isonment for some
insignificant misdemeanor. You lower him in the eyes of the public,
subject him to surveillance by the police, and send him to prison from
whence he will go out more corrupted than he was on entering it. It is
absurd to impose segregation in prison for small errors. Compensation
for injuries is enough. For the segregation of the graver criminals, the
management must be as scientific as it is now in insane asylums. It is
absurd to place an old pensioned soldier or a hardened bureaucrat at the
head of a penal institution. It is enough to visit one of those
compulsory human beehives and to see how a military discipline carries a
brutal hypocrisy into it. The management of such institutions must be
scientific, and the care of their inmates must be scientific, since a
grave crime is always a manifestation of the pathological condition of
the individual. In America there are already institutions, such as the
Elmira Reformatory, where the application of the methods of the positive
school of criminology has been solemnly promised. The director of the
institution is a psychologist, a physician. When a criminal under age is
brought in, he is studied from the point of view of physiology and
psychology. The treatment serves to regenerate the plants who, being
young, may still be straightened up. Scientific therapeutics can do
little for relapsed criminals. The present repression of crime robs the
prisoner of his personality and reduces him to a number, either in mass
imprisonment which corrupts him completely, or in solitary confinement,
which will turn him into a stupid or raving beast.

These methods are also gradually introduced in the insane asylums. I
must tell you a little story to illustrate this. When I was a professor
in Pisa, eight years ago, I took my students to the penitentiaries and
the asylum for the criminal insane in Montelupo, as I always used to do.
Dr. Algieri, the director of this asylum, showed us among others a very
interesting case. This was a man of about 45, whose history was shortly
the following: He was a bricklayer living in one of the cities of
Toscana. He had been a normal and honest man, a very good father, until
one unlucky day came, in which a brick falling from a factory broke a
part of his skull. He fell down unconscious, was picked up, carried to
the hospital, and cured of his external injury, but lost both his
physical and moral health. He became an epileptic.

And the lesion