Ferri and Garofalo

Raffaele Garofalo

A magistrate and professor, and the most legally minded of the three. He gave the discipline its name, in the title of his Criminologia of 1885.

Natural crime. Garofalo was troubled by the circularity that runs through this whole paper: if crime is what the law says, then criminology's subject changes whenever a legislature votes. He tried to escape it by defining crime independently of any statute. Natural crime, he said, is conduct that offends the basic moral sentiments that every civilised society shares, and he identified two: pity, the revulsion against inflicting suffering, and probity, respect for the property rights of others. Offences against pity are the violent crimes; offences against probity are the crimes of dishonesty.

Rejection of atavism. Garofalo did not accept Lombroso's physical type. He located the defect in a moral anomaly, a deficiency in the altruistic sentiments, which he regarded as psychological and inherited rather than as a physical throwback.

His classification. Murderers, in whom both pity and probity are absent; violent criminals, deficient in pity; thieves, deficient in probity; and lascivious criminals, whose offences he treated as a separate class.

Elimination. Garofalo's response to crime is the harshest of the three and it must be stated. Because the defect is a permanent deficiency in the moral sense, he argued for the elimination of those who cannot adapt: death for those wholly lacking the altruistic sentiments, transportation or long confinement for those partially lacking them, and enforced reparation for those whose offending arose from circumstance.

Criticism

Ferri's saturation law cannot be tested. It is a metaphor from chemistry, and no quantity in it can be measured, so it cannot fail.

Ferri's penal substitutes are unspecific. Almost any social improvement can be described as a penal substitute, which makes the idea powerful as a slogan and weak as a programme. Modern situational prevention is the disciplined version of it.

Garofalo's natural crime is not universal. Societies differ profoundly about which killings and which takings offend pity and probity, and his two sentiments are a description of nineteenth-century European bourgeois morality presented as a human constant.

And it excludes the offences this paper cares about most. Tax evasion, corruption, adulteration and pollution offend neither pity nor probity as Garofalo drew them, so his natural crime leaves out precisely the conduct Module III is about. That is the sharpest objection available and it should be made.

Garofalo's elimination is unacceptable, and his influence on later authoritarian penal thinking is documented.

A worked example

A city has a persistent problem of chain snatching from two-wheelers at traffic signals.

Ferri's analysis. Anthropological factors: the offenders are overwhelmingly young men, which is a constant everywhere. Physical factors: the offences cluster in the evening and in the months when people wear more gold at festivals. Social factors: the availability of a market for melted gold, the ease of escape through congested lanes, and the low probability of detection.

Ferri's prescription is not a longer sentence. It is a set of penal substitutes: lighting and cameras at the identified signals, regulation of the small dealers who buy the gold, and traffic engineering that removes the escape route. Every one of those attacks a condition rather than a person, and every one is what a modern crime prevention unit would in fact propose.

Garofalo's analysis. The offence is a crime against probity, so it is natural crime and would be criminal in any society. That tells us the conduct is properly criminalised. It tells us nothing whatever about how to reduce it, which is the difference between the two men in one paragraph.

Quick revision

• Enrico Ferri, Criminal Sociology. The law of criminal saturation: given conditions produce a given quantity of crime. Three classes of factor: anthropological, physical and social. Five classes of criminal: born, insane, habitual, occasional and by passion. Penal substitutes: change the conditions rather than raise the punishment.
• Raffaele Garofalo, Criminologia, 1885, who gave the discipline its name. Natural crime: conduct offending the basic sentiments of pity and probity. Moral anomaly rather than physical atavism. Classification: murderers, violent criminals, thieves and lascivious criminals. Response: elimination, by death, transportation or enforced reparation.
• Criticism: saturation is untestable; penal substitutes are too broad to be a programme; natural crime is not universal and excludes corruption, tax evasion, adulteration and pollution; and Garofalo's elimination is unacceptable.
• Ferri's three classes of factor are the direct ancestor of the multiple factor approach in Module II.

Test yourself

1. State Ferri's law of criminal saturation and his three classes of factor. That a given society in given physical and social conditions produces a determinate quantity of crime, neither more nor less, as a solvent at a given temperature dissolves a fixed quantity of a substance. His factors are anthropological, belonging to the offender's physical and mental constitution and personal circumstances; physical, belonging to the natural environment such as climate, season and temperature; and social, covering population, migration, religion, family, education, alcohol, the economic and political order and the administration of justice.

2. What are penal substitutes and why do they matter today? Measures that prevent crime by altering the conditions that produce it rather than by punishing offenders: Ferri's own examples include public lighting, regulation of the liquor trade, cheap housing, savings banks and reform of the administration of justice. They matter because they are the ancestor of modern situational crime prevention, which is among the few approaches with a consistently demonstrated effect on crime rates.

3. What is natural crime and what is the decisive objection to it? Garofalo's attempt to define crime without reference to any statute, as conduct offending the basic moral sentiments of pity, the revulsion at inflicting suffering, and probity, respect for the property of others. The decisive objection for this paper is that the definition excludes corruption, tax evasion, adulteration and pollution, which offend neither sentiment as he drew them, so it leaves out exactly the conduct that Module III of this syllabus is concerned with.