In addition to this demonstration, we have given anthropological
and statistical proofs of the fundamental distinction between
habitual and occasional criminals, which had been pointed out by
many observers, but which had hitherto remained a simple assertion
without manifest consequences.
This same distinction ought to be not only the basis of all
sociological theory concerning crime, but also a point of
departure for other distinctions more precise and complete, which
I set forth in my previous studies on criminals, and which were
subsequently reproduced, with more or less of assent, by all
criminal sociologists.
In the first place, it is necessary to distinguish, amongst
habitual criminals, those who present a conspicuous and clinical
form of mental aberration, which accounts for their anti-social
activity.
In the second place, amongst habitual criminals who are not of
unsound mind, however little the inmates of prisons may have been
observed with adequate ideas and experience, there is a clear
indication of a class of individuals, physically or mentally
abnormal, induced to crime by inborn tendencies, which are
manifest from their birth, and accompanied by symptoms of extreme
moral insensibility.
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