In the same way, from the standpoint of criminal sociology, we may
divide the social strata into three analogous categories--the
highest, which commits no crimes, organically upright, restrained
only by the authority of the moral sense, of religious sentiments
and public opinion, together with the hereditary transmission of
moral habits. This class, for which no penal code would be
necessary, is unfortunately very small; and it is far smaller if,
in addition to legal and apparent criminality, we also take
into account that social and latent criminality through which many
men, who are upright so far as the penal code is concerned, are
not upright by the standard of morality.
Another class, the lowest, is made up of individuals opposed to
all sense of uprightness, who, being without education,
perpetually dragged back by their material and moral destitution
into the primitive forms of the brute struggle for existence,
inherit from their parents and transmit to their children an
abnormal organisation, adding degeneration and disease, an
atavistic return to savage humanity. This is the nursery of the
born criminals, for whom punishments, so far as they are legal
deterrents, are useless, because they encounter no moral sense
which could distinguish punishment by law from the risk which also
attends upon every honest industry.
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