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

get home, and just as he is putting his hat on his head, along comes a man who wants to lay information concerning some ancient apparent perjury. The man had let it go for years, here he is with it again at just this inconvenient moment. He has come a long distance —he can not be sent away. His case, moreover, seems improbable and the man expresses himself with difficulty. Finally, when the protocol is made, it appears that he has not been properly understood, and moreover, that he has added many irrelevant things—in short, he strains one’s patience to the limit. Now, I should like to know the criminalist who would not acquire a vigorous prejudice against this complainant? It would be so natural that nobody would blame one for such a prejudice. At the same time it is proper to require that it shall be only transitive, and that later, when the feeling has calmed, everything shall be handled with scrupulous conscientiousness so as to repair whatever in the first instance might have been harmed.

It is neither necessary nor possible to discuss all the particular forms of prepossession. There is the unconditional necessity of merely making a thoroughly careful search for their presence if any indication whatever, even the remotest, shows its likelihood.

Of the extremest limit of possible prejudice, names may serve as examples. It sounds funny to say that a man may be prejudiced for or against an individual by the sound of his name, but it is true.

Who will deny that he has been inclined to favor people because they bore a beloved name, and who has not heard remarks like, “The very name of that fellow makes me sick.” I remember clearly two cases. In one, Patriz Sevenpounder and Emmerenzia Hinterkofler were accused of swindling, and my first notion was that such honorable names could not possibly belong to people guilty of swindling.

The opposite case was one in which a deposition concerning some attack upon him was signed by Arthur Filgr<e’>. I thought at first that the whole complaint was as windy as the complainant’s name.

Again, I know that one man did not get the job of private secretary he was looking for because his name, as written, was Kilian Krautl.

“How can a man be decent, who has such a foolish name?” said his would-be employer. Then again, a certain Augustinian monk, who was a favorite in a large city, owed his popularity partly to his rhythmical cognomen Pater Peter Pumm.

Our poets know right well the importance for us short-sighted earth-worms of so indifferent a thing as a name, and the best among them are very cautious about the selection and composition of names.

Not the smallest part of their effects lies in the successful tone of the <p 415>

names they use. And it was not unjust to say that Bismark could not possibly have attained his position if he had been called Maier.

Section 94. (d) Imitation and the Crowd.

The character of the instinct of imitation and its influence on the crowd has long been studied in animals, children, and even men, and has been recognized as a fundamental trait of intellect and the prime condition of all education. Later on its influence on crowds was observed, and Napoleon said, “Les crimes collectifs n’engagent personnes.” Weber spoke of moral contagion, and it has long been known that suicide is contagious. Baer, in his book on “Die Gef<a:>ngnisse,” has assigned the prison-suicides “imitative tendency.”

There is the remarkable fact that suicides often hang themselves on trees which have already been used for that purpose. And in jails it is frequently observed that after a long interval a series of suicides suddenly appear.

The repetition of crimes, once one has been committed in a particular way, is also frequent; among them, the crime of child-murder.

If a girl has stifled her child, ten others do so; if a girl has sat down upon it, or has choked it by pressing it close to her breast, etc., there are others to do likewise. Tarde believes that crime is altogether to be explained by the laws of imitation. It is still unknown where imitation and the principles of statistics come into contact, and it is with regard to this contact we find our greatest difficulties.

When several persons commit murder in the same way we call it imitation, but when definite forms of disease or wounds have for years not been noticed in hospitals and then suddenly appear in numbers, we call it duplication. Hospital physicians are familiar with this phenomenon and count on the appearance of a second case of any disease if only a first occurs. Frequently such diseases come from the same region and involve the same extraordinary abnormalities, so that nothing can be said about imitation. Now, how can imitation and duplication be distinguished in individual cases?

Where are their limits? Where do they touch, where cover each other? Where do the groups form?

There is as yet no solution for the crimino-political interpretation of the problems of imitation, and for its power to excuse conduct as being conduct’s major basis. But the problems have considerable symptomatic and diagnostic value. At the very least, we shall be able to find the sole possibility of the explanation of the nature or manner of a crime in the origin of the stimulus to some particular <p 416>

imitation. Among youthful persons, women especially, there will be some anticipatory image which serves as a plan, and this will explain at least the otherwise inexplicable and superfluous concomitants like unnecessary cruelty and destruction. The knowledge of this anticipatory image may give even a clew to the criminal, for it may indicate the nature of the person who could act it out and realize it. Also in our field there exists “duplication of cases.”

The condition of action in great crowds offers remarkable characteristics. The most instructive are the great misfortunes in which almost every unhappy individual conducts himself, not only irrationally but, objectively taken, criminally towards his fellows, inasmuch as he sacrifices them to his own safety without being in real need. To this class belong the crossing of bridges by retreating troops in which the cavalry stupidly ride down their own comrades in order to get through. Again, there are the well-known accidents, e. g., at the betrothal of Louis XVI., in which 1200 people were killed in the crush, the fires at the betrothal of Napoleon, in the Viennese Ringtheater in 1881, and the fire on the picnic-boat “General Slocum,” in 1904. In each of these cases horrible scenes occurred, because of the senseless conduct of terrified people. It is said simply and rightly, by the Styrian poet, “One individual is a man, a few are people, many are cattle.” In his book on imitation, Tarde says, “In crowds, the calmest people do the silliest things,” and in 1892, at the congress for criminal anthropology, “The crowd is never frontal and rarely occipital; it is mainly spinal. It always contains something childish, puerile, quite feminine.” He, Garnier, and Dekterew, showed at the same congress how frequently the mob is excited to all possible excesses by lunatics and drunkards. Lombroso, Laschi, etc., tell of many cruelties which rebelling crowds committed without rhyme or reason.[1] The “soul of the crowd,”

just recently invented, is hardly different from Schopenhauer’s Macroanthropos, and it is our important task to determine how much the anthropos and how much the macroanthropos is to be blamed for any crime.

[1] Cf. Friedmann: Die Wahnsinn im V<o:>lkerleben. Wiesbaden 1901.

Sighele: La folla deliquente. Studio di psicologia Collettiva 2d Ed. Torino 1895. I delitti della folla studiati seconde la psicologia, il diritto la giurisprudenza. Torino 1902.

Section 95. (e) Passion and Affection.

Passion and affection occasion in our own minds and in those of witnesses considerable confusion of observations, influence, or even <p 417>

effect the guilt of the defendant and serve to explain many things at the moment of examination. The essence of passion or affection, its definition and influence, its physical and physiological explanation, is discussed in any psychology. The use of this discussion for the lawyer’s purposes has been little spoken of, and possibly can not have more said about it. Things that are done with passion show themselves as such, and require no particular examination in that respect. What we have to do is to discover what might have happened without passion, and especially to protect ourselves from being in person overcome by passion or affection. It is indubitable that the most “temperamental” of the criminalists are the best, for phlegm and melancholy do not carry one through an examination.

The lively and the passionate judges are the most effective, but they also have the defects of their virtues. No one will deny that it is difficult to maintain a calm demeanor with an impudent denying criminal, or in the face of some very cruel, unhuman, or terrible crime. But it is essential to surmount this difficulty. Everyone of us must recall shameful memories of having, perhaps justly, given way to passion. Of course the very temperamental Count Gideon Raday freed his county in a short time from numberless robberies by immediately hanging the mayor of the town in which the robberies occurred, but nowadays so much temperament is not permissible.

It is well to recall the painful position of an excellent presiding justice at a murder trial, who attacked the defendant passionately, and had to submit to the latter’s really justified reprimand.

The only means of avoiding such difficulties is not to begin quarrelling.

Just as soon as a single word is uttered which is in any way improper in polite society, everything is lost. The word is the rolling snow-ball, and how much momentum it may gather depends upon the nature and the training of the judge. Lonely insults are not frequent, and a single improper word breaks down the boundaries.

The criminal knows this and often makes use of his knowledge. A man who has “cussed out” the other fellow is no longer dangerous, he becomes calm and kind, and feels instinctively the need of repairing the damage he has committed by “going too far.” He then exhibits an exaggerated geniality and care upon which many criminals count, and hence intentionally provoke the examiner until he does things and says things he is sorry for.

The emotions of witnesses, especially of those who have been harmed by the crime and of those who have seen something terrible <p 418>

and disgusting, and who still tend to get excited over it, constitute a great many difficulties. Against the unconditional reliability of such persons’ testimony experienced judges take measures of defence.

The participant of this class is never calm; passion, anxiety, anger, personal interest, etc., either anticipate or exaggerate trouble. Of course, we are not speaking of cases in which a wound is considerably exaggerated, or even invented for the sake of money, but of those in which people under emotional stress often say unthinkable things about their enemy, just to get him punished. This, however, is comparatively rare where the damage has been very great. A man who has lost his eye, the father of a raped daughter, the victim impoverished by arson, often behaves very calmly toward the criminal. He makes no especial accusation, does not exaggerate, and does not insult. A person, however, whose orchard has suffered damage, may behave much worse.

It frequently happens that the sufferer and the defendant really hate each other. Not necessarily because one had broken the other’s head, or robbed him; frequently the ostensible reason for coming to trial is the result of a long and far-reaching hatred. That this emotion can go to any length is