name of Enrico
Pessina. And it is easy to understand that there, where the majestic
tree spreads out its branches towards the blue vault, the young plant
feels deprived of light and air, while it might have grown strong and
beautiful in another place.

The positive school of criminology, then, was born in our own Italy
through the singular attraction of the Italian mind toward the study of
criminology; and its birth is also due to the peculiar condition our
country with its great and strange contrast between the theoretical
doctrines and the painful fact of an ever increasing criminality.

The positive school of criminology was inaugurate by the work of Cesare
Lombroso, in 1872. From 1872 to 1876 he opened a new way for the study
of criminality by demonstrating in his own person that we must first
understand the criminal who offends, before we can study and understand
his crime. Lombroso studied the prisoners in the various penitentiaries
of Italy from the point of view of anthropology. And he compiled his
studies in the reports of the Lombardian Institute of Science and
Literature, and published them later together in his work "Criminal
Man." The first edition of this work (1876) remained almost unnoticed,
either because its scientific material was meager, or because Cesare
Lombroso had not yet drawn any general scientific conclusions, which
could have attracted the attention of the world of science and law. But
simultaneously with its second edition (1878) there appeared two
monographs, which constituted the embryo of the new school,
supplementing the anthropological studies of Lombroso with conclusions
and systematizations from the point of view of sociology and law.
Raffaele Garofalo published in the Neapolitan Journal of Philosophy and
Literature an essay on criminality, in which he declared that the
dangerousness of the criminal was the criterion by which society should
measure the function of its defense against the disease of crime. And in
the same year, 1878, I took occasion to publish a monograph on the
denial of free will and personal responsibility, in which I declared
frankly that from now on the science of crime and punishment must look
for the fundamental facts of a science of social defense against crime
in the human and social life itself. The simultaneous publication of
these three monographs caused a stir. The teachers of classic
criminology, who had taken kindly to the recommendations of Pessina an