ange of
treatment immediately changed the attitude of the man. He first had a
nervous fit and then broke into tears and told me his story with the
eloquence of suffering. He said that he had some days in which he was
not master of himself, but he recognized that he was good whenever the
attacks of temper were over. Without saying so, he thus invoked the
wisdom of human psychology for better treatment. There is indeed a
physician in those prisons, but he treats generally only the ordinary
diseases and is not familiar with special psychological knowledge. There
may be exceptions, and in that case it is a lucky coincidence. But the
prison doctor has also his practice outside and hurries through his
prison work. "They simulate sickness in order to get out of prison," he
says. And this will be so all the more that the physicians of our time
have not sufficient training in psychology to enable them to do justice
to the psychology of the criminal.

You must, therefore, give a scientific management to these institutions,
and you will then render humane even the treatment of those grave and
dangerous criminals, whose condition cannot be met by a simple
compensation of the injury they have done to others.

This is the function of repression as we look upon it, an inevitable
result of the positive data regarding the natural origin of crime.

We believe, in other words, that repression will play but an unimportant
role in the future. We believe that every branch of legislation will
come to prefer the remedies of social hygiene to those symptomatic
remedies and apply them from day to day. And thus we come to the theory
of the prevention of crime. Some say: "it is better to repress than to
prevent." Others say: "It is better to prevent than to repress." In
order to solve this conflict we must remember that there are two widely
different kinds of repression. There is the immediate, direct empirical
repression, which does not investigate the cause of criminality, but
waits until the crime is about to be committed. That is police
prevention. There is on the other hand a social prevention which has an
indirect and more remote function, which does not wait until crime is
about to be committed, but locates the causes of crime in poverty,
abandoned children, trampdom, etc, and seeks to prevent these
conditions by remote and indirect means. In Italy, prevention is
anonymous with arrest. That is to say, by repression is understood only
pol