On the inception or the growth of a criminal manifestation,
legislators, jurists, and public think only of the remedies, which
are as easy as they are illusory, of the penal code, or of some
new Act of repression. Even if this were useful, which is very
problematical, it has the inevitable disadvantage of making men
ignore other remedies, far more profitable, albeit more difficult,
of a preventive and social kind. And this tendency is so common
that many of those who have dwelt upon or accepted the positive
movement of the new school, not long after they had admitted that
I was in the right, declared impulsively that ``the constant
commission of crime arises from the lack of timely repression,''
and that ``one of the chief causes of the growth of crime in Italy
is the mildness of our punishments.'' Or else they forgot to ask
themselves the elementary question of criminal sociology, whether
and how far punishments have a genuinely defensive force. This is
just what happens with pedagogues who enter upon long discussions
on the various methods and means of education, without
asking themselves beforehand whether and how far education has the
actual power of modifying the temperament and character which
heredity stamps upon every individual.
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