Criminal Psychology by Hans Gross (best book recommendations .TXT) 📕

its nature, but the nature of the observer. It would seem that the criminalist might save himself much work by observing the laughter of his subjects. The embarrassed, foolish snickering of the badly observing witness; the painful smile of the innocent prisoner, or the convicted penitent; the cruel laughter of the witness glad of the damage he has done; the evil laughter of the condemning accomplice; the happy, weak laughter of the innocent who has adduced evidence of his innocence, and the countless other forms of laughter, all these vary so much with the character of the laugher, and are so significant, that hardly anything compares with them in value. When you remember, moreover, that concealment during laughter is not easy, at least at the moment when the laughter ceases, you see how very important laughter may be in determining a case.

 

Of equal importance with laughter are certain changes which may occur in people during a very short time. If we observe in the course of the daily life, that people, without any apparent reason, so change that we can hardly recognize them, the change becomes ten times more intense under the influence of guilt or even of imprisonment.

Somebody said that isolation has revealed the greatest men, the greatest fools, and the greatest criminals. What, then, might be the influence of compulsory isolation, i. e., of imprisonment!

We fortunately do not live in a time which permits imprisonment for months and years in even the simplest cases, but under certain circumstances even a few days’ imprisonment may completely alter a person. Embitterment or wildness may exhibit itself, just as sorrow and softness, during the stay under arrest. And hence, the criminalist who does not frequently see and deal with his subjects does not perform his duty. I do not mean, of course, that he should see them for the purpose of getting a confession out of an attack of morbidity; I mean only, that this is the one way of getting a just and correct notion of the case. Every criminalist of experience will <p 397>

grant that he sees the event, particularly the motives of the criminal, otherwise after the first examination than after the later ones, and that his later notions are mainly the more correct ones. If we set aside the unfortunate cases in which the individual held for examination is instructed by his prison-mates and becomes still more spoiled, I might permit myself the assertion that imprisonment tends to show the individual more correctly as he is; that the strange surroundings, the change from his former position, the opportunity to think over his situation may, if there are no opposing influences, help the criminalist a great deal, and this fact is confirmed in the superior results of later to earlier examinations.

 

In addition, the bodily condition and the health of the prisoner change almost always. The new mode of life, the different food and surroundings, the lack of movement, the moral effect, work directly on the body, and we must confess, unfortunately, on health. There are, however, cases in which health has been improved by imprisonment, especially the health of people who have led a wild, irregular, drunken life, or such who have had to worry and care too much.

But these are exceptions, and as a rule the prisoner’s physique suffers a great deal, but fortunately for a short time only. The influence of such effects on the mind is familiar. The bodily misfortune gives a wide opening for complete change in moral nature; health sustains the atheist in darkness. This fact, as mentioned by Bain, may serve to explain the origin of many a confession which has saved an innocent person at the last moment.

 

Nor must we forget that time—and for the prisoner, imprisonment is time endowed with power—effects many an adjustment of extremes. We know that utter evil is as rare as perfect virtue.

We have nothing to do with the latter, but we almost as infrequently meet the former. The longer we deal with “bad men,” the more inclined are we to see the very summit of devilment as the result of need and friendlessness, weakness, foolishness, flightiness, and just simple, real, human poorness of spirit. Now, what we find so redistributed in the course of years, we often find crushed together and fallen apart in a short time. Today the prisoner seems to us the most dreadful criminal; in a few days, we have calmed down, have learned to know the case from another side, the criminal has shown his real nature more clearly, and our whole notion of him has changed.

 

I frequently think of the simple story of Charles XII’s sudden entry into Dresden. The city fathers immediately called an ex-

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traordinary session for the next day in order to discuss, as the Swedish king supposed, what they should have done the day before. Every examined prisoner does the same thing. When he leaves the court he is already thinking of what he should have said differently, and he repeats his reflections until the next examination. Hence, his frequently almost inexplicable variety of statements, and hence, also, the need of frequent examination.

 

Finally, there is the fact Mittermaier has pointed to—the importance of the criminalist’s own culture and character. “If a girl testifies for her lover and against her brother, the question in judgment arises, which voice is the more powerful? The judge will not easily be able to divorce this standard of judgment from himself and his own view of life.” This is a frequent occurrence. You consider a difficult psychological case in all its aspects, and suddenly, without knowing how or why, you have found its solution: “It must have been so and not otherwise; he has acted so and so for this reason, etc.” A close examination of such a definite inference will convince you that it is due to the pathetic fallacy, i. e., you have so inferred because you would have done so, thought and desired so, under similar circumstances. The commission of the pathetic fallacy is the judge’s greatest danger.

 

Section 90. (6) Intelligence and Stupidity.

 

The three enemies of the criminalist are evil nature, untruth, and stupidity or foolishness. The last is not the least difficult. Nobody is safe from its attacks; it appears as the characteristic of mankind in general, in their prejudices, their preconceptions, their selfishness, and their high-riding nature. The criminalist has to fight it in witnesses, in jurymen, and frequently in the obstinacy, dunderheadedness, and amusing self-conceit of his superiors. It hinders him in the heads of his colleagues and of the defendant, and it is his enemy not least frequently in his own head. The greatest foolishness is to believe that you are not yourself guilty of foolishness.

The cleverest people do the most idiotic things. He makes the most progress who keeps in mind the great series of his own stupidities, and tries to learn from them. One can only console oneself with the belief that nobody else is better off, and that every stupidity is a basis for knowledge. The world is such that every foolishness gets somebody to commit it.

 

Foolishness is an isolated property. It is not related to intelligence as cold to warmth, Cold is the absence of heat, but foolishness <p 399>

is not the absence of intelligence. Both are properties that look in the same direction. Hence, it is never possible to speak of intelligence or stupidity by itself. Whoever deals with one deals with the other, but it would be a mistake to conceive them as a developing series at one end of which is intelligence, and at the other, stupidity. The transition is not only frequent, but there are many remarkable cases in which one passes into the other, gets mixed up with it, and covers it. Hence, a thing may often be at one and the same time intelligent and stupid, intelligent in one direction and stupid in another; and it is not incorrect, therefore, to speak of clever stupidities, and of clever deeds that are heartily foolish.

 

The importance of stupidity is due not only to the fact that it may lead to important consequences, but also to the difficulty of discovering it in certain cases. It is before all things correct, that foolish people often seem to be very wise, and that as a rule, much intercourse alone is able to reveal the complete profundity of a man’s foolishness. But in our work we can have little intercourse with the people whom we are to know, and there are, indeed, persons whom we take to be foolish at the first encounter, and who really are so when we know them better. And even when we have learned the kind and degree of a man’s foolishness, we have not learned his way of expressing it, and that discovery requires much wisdom. Moreover, an incredible amount of effort, persistence, and slyness is often made use of for the purpose of committing an immense act of foolishness. Every one of us knows of a number of criminal cases that remained unexplained for a long time simply because some one related event could be explained by a stupidity so great as to be unbelievable. Yet the knowledge that such stupidity actually exists could explain many a similar matter, simply and easily. This is especially true with regard to the much discussed “one great stupidity,” which the criminal commits in almost every crime. Assume that such a stupidity is impossible, and the explanation of the case is also impossible. We must never forget that it is exactly the wise who refuse to think of the possibility of foolishness.

Just as everything is clean to the cleanly, and everything is philosophic to the philosopher, everything is wise to the wise. Hence, he finds it unintelligible that a thing may be explained from the point of view of pure unreason. His duty therefore, is, to learn as much and as accurately as possible about the nature of foolishness.

 

There are, perhaps, few books on earth that contain so many clever things as Erdmann’s little text “Concerning Foolishness ”

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(<U:>ber die Dummheit). Erdmann starts with small experiences. For example, he once came early to the Hamburg Railway Station and found in the waiting-room one family with many children, from whose conversation he learned that they were going to visit a grandfather in Kyritz. The station filled up, to the increasing fear of the smallest member of the family, a boy. When the station grew quite full he suddenly broke out: “Look here, what do all these people want of grandfather in Kyritz.” The child supposed that because he himself was travelling to Kyritz all other people in the same place could have had no different intention. This narrowness of the point of view, the generalization of one’s own petty standpoint into a rule of conduct for mankind is, according to Erdmann, the essence of foolishness. How far one may go in this process without appearing foolish may be seen from another example. When, in the sixties, a stranger in Paris spoke admiringly of the old trees on a certain avenue, it was the habit of the Parisians to answer, “Then you also do not agree with Haussmann?” because everybody knew about the attempt by the Parisian prefect, Baron Haussmann, to beautify Paris by killing trees. If, however, the trees in the churchyard of the little village are praised, and the native peasant replies, “So you know also that our Smith wants to have the trees chopped down,”

the remark is foolish, because the peasant had no right to assume that the world knows of the intentions of the village mayor.

 

Now, if you decrease the number of viewpoints, and narrow the horizon, you reach a point where the circumference of ideas is identical with