Criminal Psychology by Hans Gross (best book recommendations .TXT) 📕

child’s practicality is the important thing. The practical child will see, observe, properly understand, and reproduce a group of things that the unpractical child has not even observed. Of course, it is well, also, to have the child talented, but I repeat: the least clever practical child is worth more as witness than the most clever unpractical child.

 

What the term “practical” stands for is difficult to say, but everybody knows it, and everybody has seen, who has cared about children at all, that there are practical children.

 

Section 81. (3) Juvenile Delinquency.

 

There have never lacked authors who have assigned to children a great group of defects. Ever since Lombroso it has been the custom in a certain circle to find the worst crimes already foreshadowed in children. If there are congenital criminals it must follow that there are criminals among children. It is shown that the most cruel and most unhuman men, like Nero, Caracalla, Caligula, Louis XI, Charles IX, Louis XIII, etc., showed signs of great cruelty, even in earliest childhood. Perez cites attacks of anger and rage in children; Moreau, early development of the sense of vengeance, Lafontaine, their lack of pity. Nasse also calls attention to the cruelty and savagery of large numbers of children, traits shown in their liking for horror-stories, in the topsy-turvy conclusion of the stories they tell themselves, in their cruelty to animals. Broussais[1]

 

[1] “Irritation et Folie.”

 

<p 370>

says, “There is hardly a lad who will not intentionally abuse weaker boys. This is his first impulse. His victim’s cries of pain restrain him for a moment from further maltreatment, if the love of bullying is not native with him. But at the first offered opportunity he again follows his instinctive impulse.”

 

Even the power of training is reduced and is expressed in the proverb, that children and nations take note only of their last beating. The time about, and especially just before, the development of puberty seems to be an especially bad one, and according to Voisin[1] and Friedreich,[2] modern man sees in this beginning of masculinity the cause of the most extraordinary and doubtful impulses. Since Esquirol invented the doctrine of monomanias there has grown up a whole literature, especially concerning pyromania among girls who are just becoming marriageable, and Friedreich even asserts that all pubescent children suffer from pyromania, while Grohmann holds that scrofulous children are in the habit of stealing.

 

When this literature is tested the conclusion is inevitable that there has been overbold generalization. One may easily see how.

Of course there are badly behaved children, and it is no agreement with the Italian positivists to add, also, that a large number of criminals were good for nothing even in their earliest youth. But we are here concerned with the specific endowment of childhood, and it is certainly an exaggeration to set this lower than that of maturity. If it be asked, what influence nurture and training have if children are good without it, we may answer at once, that these have done enough in having supplied a counterbalance to the depraving influences of life,—the awakening passions and the environment.

 

Children who are bad at an early age are easily noticeable. They make noise and trouble as thousands of well-behaved children do not, and a poor few of such bad ones are taken to be representative of all. What is silent and not significant, goes of itself, makes no impression, even though it is incomparably of greater magnitude.

Individual and noisy cases require so much attention that their character is assigned to the whole class. Fortune-telling, dreams, forewarnings, and prophecies are similarly treated. If they do not succeed, they are forgotten, but if in one case they succeed, they make a great noise. They appear, therefore, to seduce the mind [1] Des Causes Marales et Physiques des Maladies Mentales. Paris 1826.

 

[2] System der Gerichtlichen Psychologie. Regensburg 1852.

 

<p 371>

into incorrectly interpreting them as typical. And generally, there is a tendency to make sweeping statements about children. “If you have understood this, you understand that also,” children are often told, and most of the time unjustly. The child is treated like a grown man to whom *this has occurred as often as that, and who has intelligence enough and experience enough to apply this to that by way of identification. Consider an exaggerated example. The child, let us say, knows very well that stealing is dishonorable, sinful, criminal. But it does not know that counterfeiting, treachery, and arson are forbidden. These differences, however, may be reduced to a hair. It knows that stealing is forbidden, but considers it permissible to “rag” the neighbors’ fruit. It knows that lying is a sin, but it does not know that certain lies become suddenly punishable, according to law, and are called frauds. When, therefore, a boy tells his uncle that father sent him for money because he does not happen to have any at home, and when the little rascal spends the money for sweets, he may perhaps believe that the lie is quite ugly, but that he had done anything objectively punishable, he may be totally unaware. It is just as difficult for the child to become subjective. The child is more of an egoist than the adult; on the one hand, because it is protected and watched in many directions by the adult; on the other, because, from the nature of things, it does not have to care for anybody, and would go shipwreck if it were not itself cared for. The natural consequences are that it does not discover the limits between what is permissible, and what is not permissible. As Kraus says,[1] “Unripe youth shows a distinct quality in distinguishing good and evil. A child of this age, that is required to judge the action or relations of persons, will not keep one waiting for the proper solution, but if the action is brought into relation to its selfhood, to its own personality, there is a sudden disingenuity, a twisting of the judgment, an incapacity in the child to set itself at the objective point of view.” Hence, it is wrong to ask a child: “Didn’t you know that you should not have done this thing?” The child will answer, “Yes, I knew,” but it does not dare to add, “I knew that other people ought not do it, but I might.”

It is not necessary that the spoiled, pampered pet should say this; any child has this prejudiced attitude. And how shall it know the limit between what is permitted it, and what is not? Adults must work, the child plays; the mother must cook, the child comes to the [1] Die Psychologie des Verbrechens. T<u:>bingen 1884.

 

<p 372>

laden table; the mother must wash, the child wears the clean clothes; it gets the titbits; it is protected against cold; it is forgiven many a deed and many a word not permitted the adult. Now all of a sudden it is blamed because it has gone on making use of its recognized privileges. Whoever remembers this artificial, but nevertheless necessary, egoism in children will have to think more kindly of many a childish crime. Moreover, we must not overlook the fact that the child does many things simply as blind imitation. More accurate observation of this well known psychological fact will show how extensive childish imitation is. At a certain limit, of course, liability is here also present, but if a child is imitating an imitable person, a parent, a teacher, etc., its responsibility is at an end.

 

All in all, we may say that nobody has brought any evidence to show that children are any worse-behaved than adults. Experience teaches that hypocrisy, calculating evil, intentional selfishness, and purposeful lying are incomparably rarer among children than among adults, and that on the whole, they observe well and willingly.

We may take children, with the exception of pubescent girls, to be good, reliable witnesses.

 

Section 82. (c) Senility.

 

It would seem that we lawyers have taken insufficient account of the characteristics of senility. These characteristics are as definitive as those of childhood or of sex, and to overlook them may lead to serious consequences. We shall not consider that degree of old age which is called second childhood. At that stage the question seriously arises whether we are not dealing with the idiocy of age, or at least with a weakness of perception and of memory so obvious that they can not be mistaken.

 

The important stage is the one which precedes this, and in which a definite decline in mental power is not yet perceivable. Just as we see the first stage of early youth come to an end when the distinction between boy and girl becomes altogether definite, so we may observe that the important activity of the process of life has run its course when this distinction begins to degenerate. It is essentially defined by the approximation to each other of the external appearance of the two sexes,—their voices, their inner character, and their attitude. What is typically masculine or feminine disappears.

It is at this point that extreme old age begins. The number of years, the degree of intelligence, education, and other differences <p 373>

are of small importance, and the ensuing particularities may be easily deduced by a consideration of the nature of extreme old age.

The task of life is ended, because the physical powers have no longer any scope. For the same reason resistance to enemies has become lessened, courage has decreased, care about physical welfare increased, everything occurs more slowly and with greater difficulty, and all because of the newly-arrived weakness which, from now on, becomes the denotative trait of that whole bit of human nature.

Hence, Lombroso[1] is not wrong in saying that the characteristic diseases of extreme old age are rarer among women than among men.

This is so because the change in women is not so sudden, nor so powerful, since they are weak to begin with, while man becomes a weak graybeard suddenly and out of the fullness of his manly strength.

The change is so great, the difference so significant and painful, that the consequence must be a series of unpleasant properties,—egoism, excitability, moroseness, cruelty, etc. It is significant that the very old man assumes all those unpleasant characteristics we note in eunuchs—they result from the consciousness of having lost power.

 

It is from this fact that Kraus (loc. cit.) deduces the crimes of extreme old age. “The excitable weakness of the old man brings him into great danger of becoming a criminal. The excitability is opposed to slowness and one-sidedness in thought; he is easily surprised by irrelevancies; he is torn from his drowse, and behaves like a somnolent drunkard…. The very old individual is a fanatic about rest—every disturbance of his rest troubles him. Hence, all his anger, all his teasing and quarreling, all his obstinacy and stiffness, have a single device: `Let me alone.’ ”

 

This somnolent drunkenness is variously valued. Henry Holland, in one of his “Fragmentary Papers,” said that age approximates a condition of dreams in which illusion and reality are easily confused.

But this can be true only of the last stages of extreme old age, when life has become a very weak, vegetative function, but hardly any crimes are committed by people in this stage.

 

It would be simpler to say that the old man’s weakness gives the earlier tendencies of his youth a definite direction which may lead to crime. All diseases develop in the direction of the newly developing weakness. But selfishness or greed are not young. Hence we must assume that an aging man who has turned miser began by being prudent, but that he did not deny himself and his friends because he knew that