And, when all
is said and done, they have clung to punishment as the chief
method of prevention.
Hence their teaching and their propositions have had no weight
with legislators, for these latter had not been convinced, as only
the criminal sociologist could convince them, that punishments are
far from having the deterrent force commonly attributed to them,
and that crime is not the outcome of free will, but rather a
natural phenomenon which can only disappear or diminish when its
natural factors are eliminated.
The legislators for their part have not only neglected the
definite teaching of these authors with more than ordinary
insight, but they have also enacted what are really penal
substitutes in a clumsy and unscientific manner.
We have thus studied the data of criminal statistics in their
theoretical and practical relations with criminal sociology, and
come to the conclusion that, since crime is a natural phenomenon,
determined by factors of three kinds, it answers on that account
to a law of criminal saturation, whereby the physical and social
environment, aided by individual tendencies, hereditary or
acquired, and by occasional impulses, necessarily determine the
extent of crime in every age and country, both in quantity and
quality.
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