THE MISMEASURE OF MANIt seems to me that the death penalty is prescribed by nature, and
operates at every moment in the life of the universe. The universal law of
evolution shows us also that vital progress of every kind is due to continual
selection, by the death of the least fit in the struggle for life. Now this
selection, in humanity as with the lower animals, may be natural or artifi-
cial. It would therefore be in agreement with natural laws that human
society should make an artificial selection, by the elimination of anti-social
and incongruous individuals.Nonetheless, Lombroso and his colleagues generally favored
means other than death for ridding society of its born criminals.
Early isolation in bucolic surroundings might mitigate the innate
tendency and lead to a useful life under close and continual super-
vision. In other cases of incorrigible criminality, transportation and
exile to penal colonies provided a more humanitarian solution than
capital punishment—but banishment must be permanent and
irrevocable. Ferri, noting the small size of Italy's colonial empire,
advocated "internal deportation," perhaps to lands not tilled
because of endemic malaria: "If the dispersion of this malaria
demands a human hecatomb, it would evidently be better to sacri-
fice criminals than honest husbandmen" (1897, p. 249). In the end,
he recommended deportation to the African colony of Eritrea.
The Lombrosian criminal anthropologists were not petty sad-
ists, proto-fascists, or even conservative political ideologues. They
tended toward liberal, even socialist, politics and saw themselves as
scientifically enlightened modernists. They hoped to use modern
science as a cleansing broom to sweep away from jurisprudence the
outdated philosophical baggage of free will and unmitigated moral
responsibility. They called themselves the "positive" school of cri-
minology, not because they were so certain (though they were), but
in reference to the philosophical meaning of empirical and objec-
tive rather than speculative.
The "classical" school, Lombroso's chief opponents, had com-
batted the capriciousness of previous penal practice by arguing that
punishment must be apportioned strictly to the nature of the crime
and that all individuals must be fully responsible for their actions
(no mitigating circumstances). Lombroso invoked biology to argue
that punishments must fit the criminal, not, as Gilbert's Mikado
would have it, the crime. A normal man might murder in a
moment of jealous rage. What purpose would execution or a life in
prison serve? He needs no reform, for his nature is good; society