![ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
"A Means of Mutation' arises from work by the group IlOlD
(http:lhak.spc.or@i0d1.Thanksto Simon Pope and Colin Greenfor
several years of it, 'Break the Law of Information' is connected to
! a project runon behalf of the group Mongrel. Thanksto Harwood,
;
Mervin Jarman, Richard Pierre Davis, Matsuko Yokokoji, and all
1
I the other participants in Natural Selection, 'Long, Dark Phone-In
i of the Soul' was originally published in Mute. Thanks to all the
1 crew there. 'Visceral Fapdes' and 'It Looks Like You're Writing a
! Letter' were fist published i
n nlepolis, Thankst
o Armin Medosch,
j
11
then-editor of this website. The work on Microsoft Word was sup-
.] ported by Norwich School of Art and Design. Thanks to Hitary
I Bedder, Helen Boorman,George MacLenom, and Simon W i o t h
I
for s
e
t
t
i
n
g up a research environment sui%cientlyhands-off to let
1 me get hands on such intractable material. 'The Imp~ssibilityof
Interface" was written during a sabbatical from Middlesex
University.Thanks to aU staff and students i
n Media, Culture, and
Communicationsthere.
All of the texts in this book have appeared in one shape or
another on the mailing tist Nettime. Thanks to the moderators and
all those who make this such a useful resource. It should also be
acknowledged that this work arises from the activity of friends,
workmates, readers, users, distributors, copiers, events, discus-
sants: activity that would be endless were it nameable-thanks.
Thanks to the Autonomedia collective and to David Mandl for
engineering the book so generously and expertly.
7](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1106141-250527035700-11a7eebe/85/Behind-The-Blip-Essays-On-The-Culture-Of-Software-Matthew-Fuller-7-320.jpg)
![BEHIND THE BLIP:
SOFTWARE AS CULTURE
[SOME ROUTES INTO "SOFTWARE CRITICISM,"
MORE WAYS OUT]
SOFTWARE CRITIC1SM?
There are two questions which I would like to begin with. First,
what kind of critical and inventive thinking is required to take the
various movements in software forward into those areas which are
necessary i
f software oIigopoIies are to be undermined?But fur-
ther, how are we to develop the capacityfor unleashing the unejr-
pected upon software and the certaintieswhich form it7
Second,what currents are emerging which demand and incor-
porate new ways of thinking about software? ,
One of the ways to think about this problem is to imagine it as
a series of articles from a new kind of computer magazine.' What
would happen if writers about computers expanded their horizons
fromthe usual close focuson benchtestsand bit-rates?What would
happen if we weren't looking at endIess articles detailing the func-
tionality of this or that new version of this or that application?
What if we could think a little more broadly-beyond the usual
instructional articles describing how to use this 6lter or that port?
What, for instance, would it mean to have a fully fledged 'software
criticism'?
First, let's look at what already exists. Certainly, we are not
short of examples of prior art. In terms of the academy, sociology,](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1106141-250527035700-11a7eebe/85/Behind-The-Blip-Essays-On-The-Culture-Of-Software-Matthew-Fuller-9-320.jpg)
![insensibility of the brute or the unconsciousness of the madman.
Eighteen went out of the world with a calm and resigned courage,
often repentant, and prepared by the exhortations of the priest.
They belonged to various social classes. Those of the lower classes
were generally more sincere, and publicly avowed their guilt, holding
themselves up as warnings to others; those belonging to the middle
classes, anxious to leave behind a doubt as to their guilt, declared
themselves innocent; others were silent. Of the 24 women, only 5
(about one-fifth) showed cowardice. Only one, a poisoner, showed
“revolting cynicism.” The rest, 18 in number, were self-possessed
and resigned, frequently repentant, and generally consoled by
religious administrations. In this category is included the Marquise
de Brinvilliers, who for a long quarter of an hour was exposed to an
immense crowd nearly naked—“mirodée, rasée, dressée et redressée
par le bourreau,” wrote Mme. de Sevigné—with unshaken firmness.
Three-fourths of the women, little more than one-fourth of the men,
are among those who died with resigned self-possession. The
cynicism, cowardice, and brutal passivity of the others alike testify to
moral insensibility.
Out of more than 400 murderers Bruce Thomson had known, only
three expressed remorse. Of the 4000 criminals who have passed
through Elmira, 36.2 per cent. showed on admission positively no
susceptibility to moral impressions; only 23.4 per cent. were
“ordinarily susceptible.” Dr. Salsotto, in his recent study of 130
women condemned for premeditated assassination or complicity in
such assassination,[56] was only able to recognise genuine penitence
in six. He is careful to point out that precise statistics on this point
are of no great value, unless they are associated with a very
intimate knowledge of individual criminals; the assumed penitence is
seldom real, and the real penitence is not obtrusive. Dostoieffsky,
the most profound student of the human heart who has ever studied
criminals intimately, has noted this fact—“In one prison there were
men whom I had known for several years, whom I believed to be
savage beasts, and for whom, as such, I felt contempt; yet at the
most unexpected moment their souls would involuntarily expand at](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1106141-250527035700-11a7eebe/85/Behind-The-Blip-Essays-On-The-Culture-Of-Software-Matthew-Fuller-15-320.jpg)
![the surface with such a wealth of sentiment and cordiality, with such
a vivid sense of their own and others’ suffering, that scales seemed
to fall from one’s eyes; for an instant the stupefaction was so great
that one hesitated to believe what one had seen and heard.”
The moral insensibility of the instinctive criminal is the cause of his
cruelty, a cruelty which he frequently displays from his childhood.
Rossi found in ten of his 100 criminals an exaggerated and
precocious cruelty; one of them, as a child, used to take young
birds, pull out their feathers, and roast them alive; another revenged
himself on birds for the punishments imposed on him by his parents.
A certain amount of cruelty is, however, almost normal in healthy
children. The instinctive criminal is more distinctively marked by his
continuance of the same practices throughout life. At Buenos Ayres a
man killed his father in order to rob him, and not finding the money,
he placed his mother’s feet on the fire to make her confess that of
which she was ignorant. Another, after killing an entire family, played
with the corpses of the children by throwing them in the air and
catching them alternately. Another, mentioned by Lombroso, when
shown a photograph of his wife whom he had murdered, testified to
the identity without the tremor of an eyelid, tranquilly adding that
after inflicting the fatal wound he had asked for forgiveness, which
had not been granted. A little nursemaid poisoned the twin children
under her care with the phosphorus from a box of matches, in order
to procure the excitement of going out to the doctor’s and the
chemist’s.[57]
In India no motive for murder seems too unnatural or too far-
fetched to be occasionally true. “A village schoolmaster in Aligarh
(1881) killed one of his pupils; and a stepfather in the same district
threw his two stepsons into the Ganges because he was tired of
them. A man in Jhansi (1885) killed his daughter because his
neighbour had slandered her, in order that the girl’s blood might be
upon the neighbour’s head. A master murdered his servant (1881)
and threw the body before his enemy’s door, solely in order to bring
a false charge against the latter. A similar case occurred in Azamgarh](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1106141-250527035700-11a7eebe/85/Behind-The-Blip-Essays-On-The-Culture-Of-Software-Matthew-Fuller-16-320.jpg)
![five years later: a boy was murdered by his grandfather and uncle;
they threw the body into a sugar-cane field, and then charged the
owner with the crime. A still stranger story comes from the Mutha
District: Randbir, a Jat, who had once been a thriving man in
Randbirpur, fell into the hands of the moneylenders, lost his property
and his house, and became for some crooked reason embittered
against his old fellow-villagers. He made up his mind to bring them
into trouble. Taking his chopper with him, he met a little Chamar girl,
whom he took into a temple in Bahadurpur. There he cut her throat
and slightly wounded himself, and then brought a charge of dacoity
and murder against the people of his old village.”[58]
Such moral insensibility is, no doubt, intimately related to the
physical insensibility already noted, and is of an equally morbid or
atypical character. It passes far beyond that of the savage with
which the moral insensibility involved in deliberately killing or
injuring a fellow-creature may fairly be compared. “How you snore!”
said one person to another. “Do it again, and I kill you.” An hour
afterwards he killed him. Lord Gifford mentions an Australian woman
of the Muliana tribe who admitted having killed and eaten two of her
own children, who annoyed her by crying. (The Australian aborigines
are, however, usually very tender to their children.) A Maori chief
said to Mr. Tregear—“If I go out for a morning walk with my spear,
and I see a man, and I push my spear through him, that isn’t
murder—that is ‘killing.’ But if I invite him to my home, give him
food, tell him to sleep, and then kill him, that is ‘murder.’”[59] Such a
clear-cut distinction as this testifies to a considerable degree of
moral insensibility. It must be noted, however, that while in this
respect the criminal approximates to the savage, he is at the same
time related to those more or less civilised persons who tolerate
killing with equanimity when it is called war.
§ 2. Intelligence.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1106141-250527035700-11a7eebe/85/Behind-The-Blip-Essays-On-The-Culture-Of-Software-Matthew-Fuller-17-320.jpg)
![and self-repeating. Like the cunning of the fox, his smartness
displays itself in furthering his schemes, and personal gratification
and comfort.” “Many criminal illiterates,” he remarks elsewhere, “are
so densely stupid as to be unable to tell the right hand from the
left.” M. Joly, discussing the criminal’s delight in ruse, adds: “Animals
are of all living things fondest of ruse when their special instincts are
in action. Idle and untrained children, resolved to deceive their
teachers and to amuse themselves at all risks, are more rusé than
their comrades at the head of the class. Women make use of ruse
much more than men.” I will quote, finally, on this point some words
of Dr. A. Krauss[60]:—“The specialists say that criminals are more
astute than intelligent. But what is this astuteness? It is an
instinctive, innate faculty, which does not depend on real
intelligence, and which is already found precociously perfected in
children, in the lowest savages, in women, and also in imbeciles;
although experience comes to its aid, it is never capable of artificial
culture. It is essentially a faculty limited to the consideration of
concrete cases, and which is chiefly concerned with the deception of
others. The mental inertia so often combined with this faculty is
recognised in this, that a criminal, in planning a crime, does not
calculate all the possible eventualities, and immediately after the
success of his action he loses all caution, as if the energy of his mind
directed to the project and its execution was exhausted at one
stroke. Beside this instinctive faculty, intelligence is a faculty of
infinite variety, which matures slowly, and gradually affects language
and questions of abstract culture. It needs to be cultivated with
diligence, and with the help of a happy organisation of the nervous
centres. It often develops late even in highly-gifted men.”
At the same time men of undoubted intellectual power are
sometimes found among criminals. Villon, one of the truest, if not
one of the greatest of poets, was a criminal, a man perpetually in
danger of the gallows; it does not seem to me, however, by any
means clear that he was what we should call an instinctive criminal.
Vidocq, a clever criminal who became an equally successful police
official, and wrote his interesting and instructive Memoirs, may not](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1106141-250527035700-11a7eebe/85/Behind-The-Blip-Essays-On-The-Culture-Of-Software-Matthew-Fuller-19-320.jpg)
![summary of his career[61]—“Jonathan Wild became as it were a
dictator; but like many of the great men of the middle ages, he
owed his greatness to double dealing. From small beginnings he
became, in London at least, the receiver-in-chief of all stolen goods.
He acquired and maintained this position by the persistent
application of two simple principles: he did his best to aid the law in
convicting all those misdoers who would not recognise his authority,
and he did his best to repair the losses of all those who had been
plundered and who took him into their confidence. By degrees he
set up an office for the recovery of missing property, at which the
government must, for a time, have connived. Here the robbed
sought an audience of the only man who could promise them
restitution; here the robbers congregated like workmen at a
workshop, to receive the pay for the work they had done. Wild was,
in some respects, more autocratic than many kings, for he had the
power of life and death. If he could reward the thief who submitted
to him, he could hang the robber who omitted to seek his protection.
If he could, for a sufficient fee, discover what had been lost, he
could, when his claims were forgotten, make the losers repent their
want of worldly wisdom. He was not above his position, and never
allowed such a sentiment as generosity to interfere with the plain
rules of business. He carried a wand of office, made of silver, which
he asserted to be an indication of authority given to him by the
government. Valuable goods he carefully stowed away in some of his
numerous warehouses; and when there was no market for them in
England, through the apathy of the persons robbed, or the dangers
to dishonest purchasers, he despatched them on board a ship of his
own to Holland, where he employed a trustworthy agent. Like
barbarian monarchs, he gave presents when he wished to express a
desire for friendship and assistance; and in order that the recipients
of these favours might not be compromised, he retained a staff of
skilled artizans, who could so change the appearance of a snuff-box,
a ring, or a watch, that not even the real owner could recognise it.
When satisfied with the good service of any of his subordinates who
might be in danger, he gave them posts in his own household, with
money and clothing, and found employment for them in clipping and](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1106141-250527035700-11a7eebe/85/Behind-The-Blip-Essays-On-The-Culture-Of-Software-Matthew-Fuller-21-320.jpg)
![guilders. Observe, ye vain and frivolous, how vanity and crime
harmonise. The Spanish robbers are as fond of this species of
display as their brethren of other lands, and, whether in prison or
out of it, are never so happy as when, decked out in a profusion of
white linen, they can loll in the sun, or walk jauntily up and down.”
He then describes the principal features of Spanish robber foppery.
[62]
More significant and even more widely spread is the moral vanity of
criminals. “In ordinary society,” said Vidocq, “infamy is dreaded;
among a body of prisoners the only shame is not to be infamous; to
be an escarpe (assassin) is the highest praise.” This is universally
true among every group of murderers or of thieves; the author of a
large criminal transaction is regarded by all his fellows as a hero,
and he looks down upon the others with contempt; the man who
has had the misfortune to be imprisoned for a small or, in the
opinion of criminal society, disreputable offence, represents himself
as the author of some crime of magnitude.
A Russian youth of nineteen killed an entire family. When he heard
that all St. Petersburg was talking of him, he said: “Now, my
schoolfellows will see how unfair it was of them to say that I should
never be heard of.” It is this same weak-minded desire to excite
interest and sympathy which leads young men and women of ill-
balanced mental organisation to commit suicide in some public and
startling fashion. The same feeling, and also, doubtless, the need for
expression, leads to the frequency with which criminals keep diaries.
The Marquise de Brinvilliers wrote a minute account of her vices and
crimes which was brought up in evidence against her; Wainewright
appears to have kept a diary of this kind which also fell into other
hands; John Wilkes Booth, the shallow-brained young actor who
killed President Lincoln, had, with his stagy patriotism, some of the
characteristics of the instinctive criminals, showing themselves
especially in his morbid vanity. The chief suffering he felt after the
deed was to his vanity. He wrote in his diary: “I struck boldly, and
not as the papers say; I walked with a firm step through thousands](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1106141-250527035700-11a7eebe/85/Behind-The-Blip-Essays-On-The-Culture-Of-Software-Matthew-Fuller-24-320.jpg)
![is in all countries so strong among criminals. The man who is
organised as we have seen the criminal to be must have some
powerful stimulant to take him out of himself, to give him a joy
which is otherwise beyond his grasp, and alcohol is the stimulant
which comes easiest to hand. When, as frequently happens, he is
the child of alcoholic parents, the craving for drink soon obtains
morbid intensity. Crime and drink are intimately bound together,
although we must beware of too unreservedly setting down drink as
the cause of crime. Both crime and drink are the morbid
manifestations of organic defects which for the most part precede
birth. The abuse of alcohol is not, however, universal among
criminals, at all events when any intellectual ability is required. “It
would not do to drink in our business,” said a sharper to Lombroso.
The criminal finds another strong form of excitement in gambling.
The love of cards is even more widely spread among criminals than
the love of drink. It frequently becomes a passion. Lauvergne tells of
a band of criminals who played for two days without intermission.
We hear of a French prisoner who gambled away his meagre rations
of bread and wine and at last died of starvation; of another who in
the excitement of the game forgot his approaching execution.
To all forms of sexual excitement, natural and unnatural, criminals of
both sexes resort, often from a very early age. The prison, in which
the criminal is confined alone, or with persons of the same sex,
serves to develop perverted sexual habits to a high degree. Prince
Krapotkine, speaking of the moral influence of prisons on prisoners
in France, writes:—“The facts which we came across during our
prison life surpass all that the most frenzied imagination could
invent. One must have been for long years in a prison, secluded
from all higher influences and abandoned to one’s own and that of a
thousand convicts’ imaginations, to come to the incredible state of
mind which is witnessed among some prisoners. And I suppose that
I shall say only what will be supported by all intelligent and frank
governors of prisons, if I say that the prisons are the nurseries for
the most revolting category of breaches of moral law.”[63] There is](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1106141-250527035700-11a7eebe/85/Behind-The-Blip-Essays-On-The-Culture-Of-Software-Matthew-Fuller-27-320.jpg)
![perched, two clarinettes, a fiddle, a loud trombone, and a deafening
drum.... In this receptacle one finds none but prostitutes and their
bullies, sharpers of all kinds, swindlers of the lowest sort, and a
good many of those disturbers of the night whose lives are divided
into two parts, one consecrated to rowdyism, the other to robbery.”
More interesting than this resort to external sources of stimulus, and
more significant of emotional instability, are the spontaneous
outbursts of excitement common among criminals, curious self-
evolved intoxications springing from mysterious and incalculable
depths of the organism. Dostoieffsky has studied these outbursts
and admirably described them. “A prisoner has lived tranquilly,” he
tells us,[64] “for several consecutive years, and his conduct has been
exemplary. All at once, to the great astonishment of his guardians,
he mutinies and recoils before no crime, even murder or rape. Every
one is astonished. This unexpected explosion is the anguished,
convulsive manifestation of personality, an instinctive melancholy, a
desire to affirm the degraded ego, an emotion which obscures the
judgment. It is like a spasm, an access of epilepsy; the man who is
buried alive and who suddenly awakes strikes in despair against his
coffin-lid; he strives to push it back, to raise it; his reason convinces
him of the uselessness of all his efforts, but reason has nothing to
do with his convulsions. It must not be forgotten that nearly every
manifestation of the personality of the prisoner is considered a
crime; also that the question whether the manifestation is important
or insignificant is perfectly indifferent to the prisoner. Risk for risk, it
is better to go to the extreme, even to murder. It is only the first
step that costs; little by little the man is carried away and can no
longer be held in.” The prison has much to answer for in the
development of these emotional outbreaks, and it is only in prison
that there is opportunity of studying them. It would, however, be
rash to conclude that they are entirely due to prison conditions. They
are in harmony with all that we know of criminal psychology, and it
is not alone under prison conditions that they are the causes of
crime.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1106141-250527035700-11a7eebe/85/Behind-The-Blip-Essays-On-The-Culture-Of-Software-Matthew-Fuller-29-320.jpg)
![In Germany these periodic explosions (known as Zuchthaus-Knall)
have been described by Delbrück and Krafft-Ebing. In Italy they
have been noted by Lombroso, especially in very hot weather and at
such times as epileptic attacks are most frequent, and he regards
them as fresh proof of a close relationship between the instinctive
criminal and the epileptic. In England they appear to be rare in men,
but, on the other hand, common in women who have, in prison
language, “broken out.” This wild fit of maniacal violence which from
time to time seizes on the women confined in prisons, and might
almost be regarded as an exaggerated or vicarious form of orgy, has
been studied with some care in England. Here as well as abroad it is
frequently supposed to be a voluntary insubordination deserving
punishment.
A lady superintendent thus described the “breaking out” to Mayhew:
—“Sometimes they know when the fit is coming on, and will
themselves ask to be locked up in the refractory wards. When
they’re in these fits they’re terribly violent indeed; they tear up and
break everything they can lay their hands on. The younger they are
the worse they behave. The most violent age, I think, is from
seventeen to two or three and twenty;—indeed they are like fiends
at that age very often.” The medical officer told him that “4 per cent.
of the whole of the prisoners, or 20 in 600, were subject to such fits
of violent passion, and these were almost invariably from fifteen to
twenty-five years of age.” “Women,” he added, “seldom injure
themselves or those around them, though they will break their
windows, and even occasionally tear their own clothing to
ribbons.”[65]
Miss Mary Carpenter, in her Female Life in Prison, reproduces what
she tells us is a characteristic dialogue:—
“‘Miss G., I’m going to break out to-night.’
“‘Oh, nonsense; you won’t think of any such folly, I’m sure.’
“‘I’m sure I shall.’](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1106141-250527035700-11a7eebe/85/Behind-The-Blip-Essays-On-The-Culture-Of-Software-Matthew-Fuller-30-320.jpg)
![“‘What for?’
“‘Well, I’ve made up my mind, that’s what for. I shall break out to-
night—see if I don’t.’
“‘Has any one offended you or said anything?’
“‘N-no. But I must break out. It’s so dull here. I’m sure to break out.’
“‘And then you’ll go to the “dark” [cell].’
“‘I want to go to the “dark.”’
“And the breaking out often occurs as promised; the glass shatters
out of the window frames; strips of sheets and blankets are passed
through or left in a heap in the cell; the guards are sent for, and
there is a scuffling and fighting and scratching and screaming that
Pandemonium might equal, nothing else.”
Dr. Nicolson has made an interesting observation as to the periods
when these “breakings-out” are most liable to occur. “At dates
corresponding with the menstrual period there is a greater likelihood
of their occurrence. Besides having verified this in several cases
myself, I have the testimony of experienced prison matrons to the
same effect.” These maniacal outbursts of hysteria may be compared
to the somewhat similar effects observed especially at the menstrual
periods among the epileptic, the insane, and the imbecile. Thus Dr.
H. Sutherland (West Riding Asylum Reports, vol. ii.), from
observations on 500 inmates of the West Riding Asylum, remarks
that in epileptic insanity the fits are generally increased in number,
and the patients generally become excited at the catamenial period;
while the mania exacerbations usually occur at this time. He notes
the frequency of excitement, violence, indecent language, tearing up
clothes, etc., among insane women generally at this period. In a girl
with congenital imbecility, who became violent, cruel, and capricious
at puberty, Dr. Langdon Down noted that the monthly period was
always marked by insubordination, violent language, rude gestures,](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1106141-250527035700-11a7eebe/85/Behind-The-Blip-Essays-On-The-Culture-Of-Software-Matthew-Fuller-31-320.jpg)
![anything it had to be satisfied. I endeavoured to reproach him as he
deserved, for I regretted my Bible. He listened to me without
irritation, very peacefully; he agreed with me that the Bible is a very
useful book, and he sincerely regretted that I no longer possessed it,
but he felt no repentance, not even for an instant, for having stolen
it; he looked at me with such assurance that I immediately ceased to
scold him. He bore my reproaches because he judged that it could
not be otherwise, that he deserved to be blamed for such an action,
and that I ought to abuse him, in order to relieve myself, as a
consolation for the loss; but privately he esteemed it a folly, a folly
which a serious man would have been ashamed to speak of. I even
think he regarded me as a child, an urchin who does not understand
the simplest things in the world.”
Precisely the same instinctive and involuntary impulses,
unaccompanied by shame, are found among various lower races. Of
the natives of British New Guinea, for instance, it has been said,
“They are inveterate thieves, but they experience no sense of shame
when they are discovered. They frequently say that they can feel an
irresistible power which compels them to put out their hand and
close it upon some article which they covet, but which does not
belong to them.”[66]
§ 5. Sentiment.
It may seem a curious contradiction of what has already been set
down concerning the criminal’s moral insensibility, his cruelty, and his
incapacity to experience remorse, when it is added that he is
frequently open to sentiment. It is, however, true. Whatever
refinement or tenderness of feeling criminals attain to reveals itself
as what we should call sentiment or sentimentality. Their cynicism
allies itself with sentiment in their literary productions. Their
unnatural loves are often sentimental, as revealed in the character of
the tattoo marks. Two interesting examples of criminal sentiment
have recently been recorded by Dr. Lindau. A German criminal (it is](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1106141-250527035700-11a7eebe/85/Behind-The-Blip-Essays-On-The-Culture-Of-Software-Matthew-Fuller-33-320.jpg)
![permitted themselves to be disrespectful or familiar. On the contrary.
When he met the governor the convict’s face suddenly lighted up; he
smiled largely, cap in hand, even to see him approach.” Prince
Krapotkine quotes and confirms the observations of Dr. Campbell, an
experienced prison surgeon. By mild treatment, says Dr. Campbell,
“with as much consideration as if they had been delicate ladies, the
greatest order was generally maintained in the hospital.” He was
struck with that “estimable trait in the character of prisoners—
observable even among the roughest criminals; I mean the great
attention they bestow on the sick. The most hardened criminals,” he
adds, “are not exempt from this feeling.”
Such sentiment as this—limited, imperfect, fantastic, as it may
sometimes seem—is the pleasantest spot in criminal psychology. It is
also the most hopeful. In the development of this tenderness lies a
point of departure for the moralisation of the criminal. What a ruined
fund of fine feeling, for instance, was concealed in the young thief,
recorded by Lombroso, who committed suicide by hanging, having
first set his shoes on the bed between two straw crosses, as though
to say, “I am going; pray for me.” “If one thinks of it,” adds
Lombroso, “it is a pathetic poem.”
§ 6. Religion.
In all countries religion, or superstition, is closely related with crime.
The Sansya dacoits, in the Highlands of Central India, would spill a
little liquor on the ground before starting on an expedition, in order
to propitiate Devi. “If any one sneezed, or any other very bad omen
was observed, the start was postponed. If they heard a jackal, or
the bray of the village donkey, their hearts were cheered; but a
funeral or a snake turned them back. They were also very
superstitious about their oil. The vessel was not allowed to touch the
ground until the oil had been poured upon the torch, and then it was
dashed on the earth; and from that moment until the job was
finished no water touched their lips.”[67]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1106141-250527035700-11a7eebe/85/Behind-The-Blip-Essays-On-The-Culture-Of-Software-Matthew-Fuller-37-320.jpg)
![Among 200 Italian murderers Ferri did not find one who was
irreligious. “A Russian peasant,” remarks Mr. Kennan, “may be a
highway robber or a murderer, but he continues nevertheless to
cross himself and say his prayers.” Dostoieffsky also notes the
religious ardour with which the convicts gave candles and gifts to
the church. All those who live by unlawful methods, said Casanova,
confide in the help of God. Naples is the most criminal city in Europe
for crimes against the person; the number of murderers there is
about 16 in 100,000, while in Italy generally it is 8.12; and in Ireland
(the least criminal land in Europe) it is about 5. Naples is also the
most religious city in Europe. “No other city,” observes Garofalo,[68]
“can boast of such frequent processions; no other, perhaps, is so
zealous an observer of the practices of the church. But unfortunately
—as an illustrious historian [Sismondi], speaking of the Italians of his
day, wrote—‘the murderer, still stained with the blood he has just
shed, devoutly fasts, even while he is meditating a fresh
assassination; the prostitute places the image of the Virgin near her
bed, and recites her rosary devoutly before it; the priest, convicted
of perjury, is never inadvertently guilty of drinking a glass of water
before mass.’ Those words of Sismondi’s,” Garofalo adds, “are as
true to-day as when they were written.” Of Marro’s 500 criminals, 46
per cent. were regular frequenters of church, 25 per cent. went
irregularly. Among sexual offenders the proportion of frequenters
rose to 61 per cent. A man of sixty, known to Marro, imprisoned for
rape on a child of eight, was much scandalised at the irreligious talk
of some of his companions. “I do not imitate them,” he said;
“morning and evening I say my prayers.”
Among women, the governor of Saint Lazare remarked to M. Joly, it
is especially the criminals by passion who are superstitious, thieves
very slightly so; they are practical women.
It must not be supposed that there is insincerity or hypocrisy in the
religion of criminals. For the man of low culture the divine powers
lend themselves easily to the succour of the individual, and it is
always as well to propitiate them. German murderers believe they](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1106141-250527035700-11a7eebe/85/Behind-The-Blip-Essays-On-The-Culture-Of-Software-Matthew-Fuller-38-320.jpg)
![can do this crudely, according to Casper, by leaving their excrement
at the spot of the crime. A rather higher grade of intelligence will
effect the same end by prayer. A wife who was poisoning her
husband wrote to her accomplice:—“He is not well ... if God wished
it. Oh, if God would have pity on us, how I would bless Him! When
he complains [of the effects of the poison] I thank God in my heart.”
And he answers, “I will pray to Heaven to aid us.” And she again,
“He was ill yesterday. I thought that God was beginning His work. I
have wept so much that it is not possible God should not have pity
on my tears.” Lombroso found 248 tattooed prisoners out of 2480
bearing religious symbols, while the slang of criminals witnesses to a
faith in God, in the immortality of the soul, and in the church. When
a woman who had strangled and dismembered a child, in order to
spite its relations, heard her sentence of death pronounced, she
turned to her advocates and said, “Death is nothing. It is the
salvation of the soul that is everything. When that is safe, the rest is
of no account.”
It is clear how easily religious beliefs and religious observances,
especially in Catholic countries, lend themselves to the practices of
the ignorant criminal, and it very rarely happens that the criminal
condemned to death fails to avail himself of the ministrations of the
chaplain (only once in more than thirty years at La Roquette), and
frequently to respond to them with gratifying eagerness. In religion
his primitive emotional nature, with its instability and love of
sentiment, easily finds what it needs. A French chaplain of
experience and intelligence told M. Joly that he had “more
satisfaction” with his prisoners than with people of the world. The
Rev. E. Payson Hammond, who has conducted many missions to
prisoners, finds very great aptitude for conversion among them. Of
the convicts of the State Prison of Jefferson City, in the United
States, for instance, he remarks:—“Many hearts were melted to
tears, and I believe that a very large number were converted.”
“Convicts at their last hour,” wrote Lauvergne, “nine times out of ten
die religiously. Whatever the enormity of their crimes, they all leave](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1106141-250527035700-11a7eebe/85/Behind-The-Blip-Essays-On-The-Culture-Of-Software-Matthew-Fuller-39-320.jpg)
Behind The Blip Essays On The Culture Of Software Matthew Fuller
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- 6. Anti-copyrightfor non-commercialpublication. Copyright 2003 Matthew F d e r otherwise. All rights reserved. Autonomedia P,O.B. 568 Williamsburgh Station Brooklyn, NY 11211-0568USA Phone & Fax: 718-963-2603 email:[email protected] htsttp:llwww.autonomedia.org Book design: Dave Mandl ISBN 1-57027-1 39-9 Printed i n Canada For Mandie, Leon, Milo, and Rosa
- 7. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS "A Means of Mutation' arises from work by the group IlOlD (http:[email protected] Simon Pope and Colin Greenfor several years of it, 'Break the Law of Information' is connected to ! a project runon behalf of the group Mongrel. Thanksto Harwood, ; Mervin Jarman, Richard Pierre Davis, Matsuko Yokokoji, and all 1 I the other participants in Natural Selection, 'Long, Dark Phone-In i of the Soul' was originally published in Mute. Thanks to all the 1 crew there. 'Visceral Fapdes' and 'It Looks Like You're Writing a ! Letter' were fist published i n nlepolis, Thankst o Armin Medosch, j 11 then-editor of this website. The work on Microsoft Word was sup- .] ported by Norwich School of Art and Design. Thanks to Hitary I Bedder, Helen Boorman,George MacLenom, and Simon W i o t h I for s e t t i n g up a research environment sui%cientlyhands-off to let 1 me get hands on such intractable material. 'The Imp~ssibilityof Interface" was written during a sabbatical from Middlesex University.Thanks to aU staff and students i n Media, Culture, and Communicationsthere. All of the texts in this book have appeared in one shape or another on the mailing tist Nettime. Thanks to the moderators and all those who make this such a useful resource. It should also be acknowledged that this work arises from the activity of friends, workmates, readers, users, distributors, copiers, events, discus- sants: activity that would be endless were it nameable-thanks. Thanks to the Autonomedia collective and to David Mandl for engineering the book so generously and expertly. 7
- 9. BEHIND THE BLIP: SOFTWARE AS CULTURE [SOME ROUTES INTO "SOFTWARE CRITICISM," MORE WAYS OUT] SOFTWARE CRITIC1SM? There are two questions which I would like to begin with. First, what kind of critical and inventive thinking is required to take the various movements in software forward into those areas which are necessary i f software oIigopoIies are to be undermined?But fur- ther, how are we to develop the capacityfor unleashing the unejr- pected upon software and the certaintieswhich form it7 Second,what currents are emerging which demand and incor- porate new ways of thinking about software? , One of the ways to think about this problem is to imagine it as a series of articles from a new kind of computer magazine.' What would happen if writers about computers expanded their horizons fromthe usual close focuson benchtestsand bit-rates?What would happen if we weren't looking at endIess articles detailing the func- tionality of this or that new version of this or that application? What if we could think a little more broadly-beyond the usual instructional articles describing how to use this 6lter or that port? What, for instance, would it mean to have a fully fledged 'software criticism'? First, let's look at what already exists. Certainly, we are not short of examples of prior art. In terms of the academy, sociology,
- 10. 12 Behind the Blip for instance, oEfers: Jeannette Hofmann's descriptions of the gen- dering of word processor software and its patterns of use within work;=Paul N. Edwards's history of the development of computer technologies through the models of science promotable at the height of the early cold war;' Michael R.Curry's formulation of a technico-aesthetic economy of signification and ownership in geo- graphic information systems;' Donald MacKenzie's work on the political implications of floating-point-unit calcdations in the design of missile guidance systemsethe list goes on and extends to substantial areas i a ethnography and anth~opology.~ Material based around philosophy and literature incIudes Michael Heim's Electric hnguage7and the contributions of Friedrich Kittler, despite his assertions that the abject of attention here does not dst.' W e can also look to texts which come out of bookshops, but that don't get libraried up so much: Howard fieingold's Tools for ThoughP and J. David Bolter's 7bring's Man,IDfor instance. T h i s list is cer- tainly short, but it does conhue, The creation of imaginary book- shelves is as good a way of thinking through combinations as the imaginary museum, and there are three areas in particular which s e e m to offer elements recomposable into a more thoroughgoing strand of thought nbout and with software. HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERFACE Human-Computer Interface (HCI) is obviousIy one area that should be turnedto. Thisis, aEter all, the point at which the machi- nations of the computer are compelled to make themselves avail- able in one way or another to a user. The way the computer makes available such use, and the assumptions made about what possible interactions might develop,are both fundamentally cultural. Given this,HCI has a n unusually narrow understanding of its scope.Much of the rhetoric is about empowerment and'the sover- eignty of the user, whose "personality' shapes and dialogues with the machine. It should be asked what model of a persona, what "human,' is engineered by HCI. We should not settle for aaswers that stray anywhere near the singalong theme-tune of 'empower- ment.' {Letus not forget that much of the methodology of HCI is still derived from theories that led B. P.Skinner to assume that he Behind the Blip: Sohare as Culture 13 could train pigeons-in the days before Cruise-to act as primitive guidance systems for missiles.) It seems clear that the vast majority of research and produc. tion in this area remains concerned with imposing functionalist models on all those systems that cohere as the user. Perhaps given soffmasefs basis in boolean logic, where every action must be trgns- mogrihed into a series oE ons and offs held in hundreds o f thou- sands of circuits, this is inevitable at a certain level. Make no mistake, HCI works. It is productive because it belongs to a long line of disciplinary idealisations of the human that nevertheless have the capacity to latch onto flesh. The mainstream of HCI is considered here to be those largely positivist approaches which are represented in standard formulations of the discipline such as the Handbooh of Human-Computer Int~raction." When it comes to arranging the most suitable combination o f ergonomics and infor- I mation-design to ensure that a pilot can drop bombs or stockbro- kers can move funds in the most efficient,'information-rich, yet j graphically and emotionally uncluttered manner,HCI delivers the goods. Reaction times-the number of interactive steps from task identihation to task execution-can be measured. The results can be tabulated against variants of the system.The whole can be fine. tuned, pixels shifted,operatives rebained: the loop between stim- ulus and response tightened into a noose. T h i s is the fatal endpoint of the standard mode of HCI.It empowers users by modelling them, and in doing so effects their disappearance, their incorpora- tion into its models. There are, of course, many 'human-centred' variants on such designs. Yet this kind of naming dustrates its fatal flaw. There is still a model of the human-what constitutes it, how it must be interfaced-being imposed here, Some dwelopments i n software design have been made by acknowledging this. Alan Cooper's" approach to interiace design works, for instance, by establishing a number of stereotypical users of a system. They are imagined as full 'characters,' users of a system which is reworked, primarily in terms of interface, in order to meet an aggregate of their needs.The deliberate fiction of user identities is made visible at the design stage in order to allow greater insight h t o the techno-aesthetic
- 11. 14 Behind the Blip Behind the Blip: Software as Culture 15 compositionof the software.A s m d , useful stepwould be to make these manufactured identities,but beat them as psycho-socialopen More broadly, much could be gained by a change i n the focus of HCI. In its emphasis on perception, on narrowly appLied psy- chology, it has split the user from any context. One thing that is compelling about software i s how it contains modeb of invoIve- ment with processes rather than simply with static elements- think about groupware, or the way i n which most previously discreteapplicationshave becomepart of wider suites of processes, to say nothing about the inhmently modular nature of Unix. What wodd it mean to incorporate a n explicitly wider notion of such processes into software-to reinfuse the social,the dynamic, the networks, the political, communality {perhapswen instead of, or aswell as,privacy)-into thecontained model of the individualised 1 user that HCI has us marked down for? : I , ; We c a n see movements toward this in sociology-and psychor- '1 ogyderived currents within HCI such as Participatory Design. Here,there is a range of collaboration between users and designers that aims to stake out a territory for certain models of what a user becomes interfaced to. Notably, this tenitory can sometimeseven be dehed geographically, as in the institutional, corporate, and trade union uptake of this approach in Scandinavia. What these approaches allow is a removal of the more or less negative precon- ditiom of the standard model of HCI that is simply applied to users by experts. The area of Computer Supported Co-operative Work brings some of these elements together, but largely as a way of making them function, of turning them to account. One tendency that is of interest here is in the proliferation of higher-levellanguagesand authorware.These allow for currents of design that place value on experimentation, rather than adherence to pre-formattednotions of functionality,to invade the conceptual and practical space of the computer. At the same time, capacities for invention do not belong solely to those who most often claim them; the problem of design, of interface, m u s t be set in wider terms. A key problem here,though, is t h e danger that a set of ques- tions tend to stabilise out as particular techniques in which some- thing gets solved. Software is a place where many energies and formations meet. At the same time, it constantly slaps up egainst its limitations, but these are limitations of its own making, formu- lated by its own terms of composition, Software is always an unsolved problem. We need ways of thinking i n t o and activating this process of becoming, rather than some "kinder' or more %re- ative"design. Another pre-sdsting area that offers insights for an understanding of software as culture is the tradition of accounts of their work by programmers.Key texts are 'Perl, the First Postmodera Computer Language,'" by Larry Wall, and Close io the Machine,laby Ellen Ullman. Both of these i n their own ways document the interrela- tion of programming w i t h other formations-culhual, social,aes- thetic. These are drives that are built into and compose software rather than use it as a neutral tool. These accounts of programming are somewhat at odds with the idealist tendencies i n computing.In the recent f i l m based on Robert Harris's novel Enigma, one of the characters m a k e s the claim most succinctly: 'With numbers, truth and beauty are the same thing.' Such statements are the pop-science version of the atbactions of so-called 'pure' matbematics. Tt is also the vision of numbers that most often h d s itsway to the big screen. (Thinkalso of the him Pi,where a cute crazy loner struggles for a glimpse of the numerical meta-reality.) But more crucially, they are e direct route to the cultural backbone of classical idealism. There are har- monious relations between formsof wery kind that can be under- stood through tbe relations between numbers.The closer they are to achievingpurjty of form,the more beautiful they become.There is an endpoint to this passage to beauty which is absolute beauty. Access to and understanding of thisbeauty is allowed ody to those souls that are themselves b e a u w . The consequences of such ordering are of course clear, if only i n the brutaljty of their collaboration with and succour for hierar-
- 13. 18 Behind the Blip and so on,are necessary.Further,it is essential to understand any such element or event as only one layer or node in a wider set of intersecting and multi-scalarformations. That is to say that, whilst within a particuIar set of conditions its function might well be to impose stasis upon another element, such an effect cannot always be depended upon. Ln addition, whilst one might deal with a par- ticular object, it must always be understood not as something static, although it may never change, but to be operating in par- ticipialL9 terms. / Such a focuson the unfolding of the particular-with an atten- tion to how they are networked out into further vectors, layers, nodes of classes, instnunentalisations,panics, quick h s , slow col- lapses, the sheerly alien fruitfulnessof digital abundance, ways in which they can be taken up and made sbange,mundane,and beau- t i f u l - w i l l at least ensure two things.First, that it busts the locks I J on the tastefully-interiored prison of stratihed interdisciplinarity. It 1would be a dire fate to end up with s repetition of the inhnitely 'recessive corridor of depleted jargons and zombie conferencing of Film Studies. Second, and in terms of activity, that an engaged process of writing on sohare might reasonably hope to avoid the fate of much recent cultural theory,that is to say, to stepoutside of its over-eager subordination to one end of the schematic of infor- mation theory: reception. AVERSION TO THE ELECTRONIC: A HALLMARK OF CONCEPTUALITY? As an exampIe of where theoretical work presents us with an opportunity to go further, I want to run through a particular exam- ple, In their book What Is Philosophy?," Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari present a back-to-basics manifesto. Philosophy has become the domain of men whose occupation is the construction of vast hulks of verbiage-immense dark ships with their single- minded captains, vessels constructed of words, unable,unwilling even to communicate amongst themselves end which, as a result, pass each other by in the night. Behind the Blip: Software as Culture 19 The book is at once a rescue of philosophy from its status as do*med Elite subculture stafled by the populations of the soon-to- be closed ghost departments of the universities of Burope, and also a restatement of the primary task of philosophy: the invention of concepts. I n order to state their case for this, they need to clear the decks of other ways in which the word concept is used.One of the problems they see facing their use of the term is that in successive challenges, philosophy faced increasingly insolent and calamitous rivals that Plato himself would have nwer imagined in his m o s t comic moments, Finally I the most shameful moment came when computer science, marketing,design, and advertising, d l the disciplines of ' I communication, seized hold of the word concept itseIf and 1 ;j said 'This is our concern, we are the creative ones,we are 9 the ideas men! W e are the friends of the concept, we put i: it in our c~mputers."~ As is well known,their work is in many ways an immense, vibrant resource. However, it appears that there is a particular blockage, more so perhaps in the work of Deleuze than of GuattarifPwhen it comes to a useable theorisation of media. There is a tendency here which is typical, not just of their work, but of m u c h theoretical work throughout the twentieth century. Whilst some media systems,such as books, music, painting, f i l m ,etc., are entered into with a profound spirit of exploration and invention, those that are electronic are treated as being fundamentallysuspi- cious. As a result, when they do touch on electronic media, their work jumps into and out of various similarlyshort and undifferen- tiated takes. In short, electronic media do participate in 'conceptu- ality.' The conceptual personae that Deleuze and Guattari so suggestively propose in What Is Philosophy? can be read as a pro- posal for an understandhg of software as a form of digital subjec- tivity-that software constructs sensoriums, that each piece o f software constructs ways of seeing, knowing, and doing in the world that at once contain a model o f that part of the world it ostensibly pertains to and that also shape it every time it is used.
- 14. Exploring the Variety of Random Documents with Different Content
- 15. insensibility of the brute or the unconsciousness of the madman. Eighteen went out of the world with a calm and resigned courage, often repentant, and prepared by the exhortations of the priest. They belonged to various social classes. Those of the lower classes were generally more sincere, and publicly avowed their guilt, holding themselves up as warnings to others; those belonging to the middle classes, anxious to leave behind a doubt as to their guilt, declared themselves innocent; others were silent. Of the 24 women, only 5 (about one-fifth) showed cowardice. Only one, a poisoner, showed “revolting cynicism.” The rest, 18 in number, were self-possessed and resigned, frequently repentant, and generally consoled by religious administrations. In this category is included the Marquise de Brinvilliers, who for a long quarter of an hour was exposed to an immense crowd nearly naked—“mirodée, rasée, dressée et redressée par le bourreau,” wrote Mme. de Sevigné—with unshaken firmness. Three-fourths of the women, little more than one-fourth of the men, are among those who died with resigned self-possession. The cynicism, cowardice, and brutal passivity of the others alike testify to moral insensibility. Out of more than 400 murderers Bruce Thomson had known, only three expressed remorse. Of the 4000 criminals who have passed through Elmira, 36.2 per cent. showed on admission positively no susceptibility to moral impressions; only 23.4 per cent. were “ordinarily susceptible.” Dr. Salsotto, in his recent study of 130 women condemned for premeditated assassination or complicity in such assassination,[56] was only able to recognise genuine penitence in six. He is careful to point out that precise statistics on this point are of no great value, unless they are associated with a very intimate knowledge of individual criminals; the assumed penitence is seldom real, and the real penitence is not obtrusive. Dostoieffsky, the most profound student of the human heart who has ever studied criminals intimately, has noted this fact—“In one prison there were men whom I had known for several years, whom I believed to be savage beasts, and for whom, as such, I felt contempt; yet at the most unexpected moment their souls would involuntarily expand at
- 16. the surface with such a wealth of sentiment and cordiality, with such a vivid sense of their own and others’ suffering, that scales seemed to fall from one’s eyes; for an instant the stupefaction was so great that one hesitated to believe what one had seen and heard.” The moral insensibility of the instinctive criminal is the cause of his cruelty, a cruelty which he frequently displays from his childhood. Rossi found in ten of his 100 criminals an exaggerated and precocious cruelty; one of them, as a child, used to take young birds, pull out their feathers, and roast them alive; another revenged himself on birds for the punishments imposed on him by his parents. A certain amount of cruelty is, however, almost normal in healthy children. The instinctive criminal is more distinctively marked by his continuance of the same practices throughout life. At Buenos Ayres a man killed his father in order to rob him, and not finding the money, he placed his mother’s feet on the fire to make her confess that of which she was ignorant. Another, after killing an entire family, played with the corpses of the children by throwing them in the air and catching them alternately. Another, mentioned by Lombroso, when shown a photograph of his wife whom he had murdered, testified to the identity without the tremor of an eyelid, tranquilly adding that after inflicting the fatal wound he had asked for forgiveness, which had not been granted. A little nursemaid poisoned the twin children under her care with the phosphorus from a box of matches, in order to procure the excitement of going out to the doctor’s and the chemist’s.[57] In India no motive for murder seems too unnatural or too far- fetched to be occasionally true. “A village schoolmaster in Aligarh (1881) killed one of his pupils; and a stepfather in the same district threw his two stepsons into the Ganges because he was tired of them. A man in Jhansi (1885) killed his daughter because his neighbour had slandered her, in order that the girl’s blood might be upon the neighbour’s head. A master murdered his servant (1881) and threw the body before his enemy’s door, solely in order to bring a false charge against the latter. A similar case occurred in Azamgarh
- 17. five years later: a boy was murdered by his grandfather and uncle; they threw the body into a sugar-cane field, and then charged the owner with the crime. A still stranger story comes from the Mutha District: Randbir, a Jat, who had once been a thriving man in Randbirpur, fell into the hands of the moneylenders, lost his property and his house, and became for some crooked reason embittered against his old fellow-villagers. He made up his mind to bring them into trouble. Taking his chopper with him, he met a little Chamar girl, whom he took into a temple in Bahadurpur. There he cut her throat and slightly wounded himself, and then brought a charge of dacoity and murder against the people of his old village.”[58] Such moral insensibility is, no doubt, intimately related to the physical insensibility already noted, and is of an equally morbid or atypical character. It passes far beyond that of the savage with which the moral insensibility involved in deliberately killing or injuring a fellow-creature may fairly be compared. “How you snore!” said one person to another. “Do it again, and I kill you.” An hour afterwards he killed him. Lord Gifford mentions an Australian woman of the Muliana tribe who admitted having killed and eaten two of her own children, who annoyed her by crying. (The Australian aborigines are, however, usually very tender to their children.) A Maori chief said to Mr. Tregear—“If I go out for a morning walk with my spear, and I see a man, and I push my spear through him, that isn’t murder—that is ‘killing.’ But if I invite him to my home, give him food, tell him to sleep, and then kill him, that is ‘murder.’”[59] Such a clear-cut distinction as this testifies to a considerable degree of moral insensibility. It must be noted, however, that while in this respect the criminal approximates to the savage, he is at the same time related to those more or less civilised persons who tolerate killing with equanimity when it is called war. § 2. Intelligence.
- 18. The two most characteristic features in the intelligence of the average criminal are at first sight inconsistent. On the one hand he is stupid, inexact, lacking in forethought, astoundingly imprudent. On the other hand he is cunning, hypocritical, delighting in falsehood, even for its own sake, abounding in ruses. These characteristics are fully illustrated in the numerous anecdotal books which have been written concerning crime and criminals. Several attempts have been made to attain accurate figures as to the relative intelligence of criminals, but there must be a considerable element of guess-work in such calculations. Dr. Marro, a reliable observer, detected a notable defect of intelligence in 21 cases out of 500. He found that incendiaries and then murderers yielded the largest proportion of individuals with defective intelligence; then came vagabonds, sexual offenders, those convicted of assault, highwaymen, and those convicted of simple theft. The fraudulent class, as well as pickpockets and burglars, showed no instances of defective intelligence. That is to say that criminals against the person show a much lower level of intelligence than criminals against property. The stupidity and the cunning of the criminal are in reality closely related, and they approximate him to savages and to the lower animals. Like the savage, the criminal is lacking in curiosity, the foundation of science, and one of the very highest acquisitions of the highly-developed man. He is constantly compared in this respect to animals. Macé, a former chief of the Parisian police de sûreté, remarks: “In spite of the cunning and tricks, which are too gratuitously credited to thieves, their stupidity generally is scarcely credible; they nearly all resemble the ostrich who, when his head is hidden behind a leaf, thinks that he is not seen because he cannot see.” Dr. Corre remarks: “There is something feline in the criminal: like the cat, indolent and capricious, yet ardent in the pursuit of an aim, the anti-social being knows only how to satisfy his impulsive instincts.” Dr. Wey of Elmira says: “It is a mistake to suppose that the criminal is naturally bright. If bright, it is usually in a narrow line
- 19. and self-repeating. Like the cunning of the fox, his smartness displays itself in furthering his schemes, and personal gratification and comfort.” “Many criminal illiterates,” he remarks elsewhere, “are so densely stupid as to be unable to tell the right hand from the left.” M. Joly, discussing the criminal’s delight in ruse, adds: “Animals are of all living things fondest of ruse when their special instincts are in action. Idle and untrained children, resolved to deceive their teachers and to amuse themselves at all risks, are more rusé than their comrades at the head of the class. Women make use of ruse much more than men.” I will quote, finally, on this point some words of Dr. A. Krauss[60]:—“The specialists say that criminals are more astute than intelligent. But what is this astuteness? It is an instinctive, innate faculty, which does not depend on real intelligence, and which is already found precociously perfected in children, in the lowest savages, in women, and also in imbeciles; although experience comes to its aid, it is never capable of artificial culture. It is essentially a faculty limited to the consideration of concrete cases, and which is chiefly concerned with the deception of others. The mental inertia so often combined with this faculty is recognised in this, that a criminal, in planning a crime, does not calculate all the possible eventualities, and immediately after the success of his action he loses all caution, as if the energy of his mind directed to the project and its execution was exhausted at one stroke. Beside this instinctive faculty, intelligence is a faculty of infinite variety, which matures slowly, and gradually affects language and questions of abstract culture. It needs to be cultivated with diligence, and with the help of a happy organisation of the nervous centres. It often develops late even in highly-gifted men.” At the same time men of undoubted intellectual power are sometimes found among criminals. Villon, one of the truest, if not one of the greatest of poets, was a criminal, a man perpetually in danger of the gallows; it does not seem to me, however, by any means clear that he was what we should call an instinctive criminal. Vidocq, a clever criminal who became an equally successful police official, and wrote his interesting and instructive Memoirs, may not
- 20. have been, as Lombroso claims, a man of genius, but he was certainly a man of great ability. Eugene Aram is now generally recognised as a comparative philologist who foresaw and to some extent inaugurated some of the later advances of that science. PLATE X. Jonathan Wild is an interesting example of a criminal of great practical ability, a man whose genius for organisation would have made him equal to any position in which he might have been placed. “In the republic of the thieves’ guild”—I quote Mr. Pike’s excellent
- 21. summary of his career[61]—“Jonathan Wild became as it were a dictator; but like many of the great men of the middle ages, he owed his greatness to double dealing. From small beginnings he became, in London at least, the receiver-in-chief of all stolen goods. He acquired and maintained this position by the persistent application of two simple principles: he did his best to aid the law in convicting all those misdoers who would not recognise his authority, and he did his best to repair the losses of all those who had been plundered and who took him into their confidence. By degrees he set up an office for the recovery of missing property, at which the government must, for a time, have connived. Here the robbed sought an audience of the only man who could promise them restitution; here the robbers congregated like workmen at a workshop, to receive the pay for the work they had done. Wild was, in some respects, more autocratic than many kings, for he had the power of life and death. If he could reward the thief who submitted to him, he could hang the robber who omitted to seek his protection. If he could, for a sufficient fee, discover what had been lost, he could, when his claims were forgotten, make the losers repent their want of worldly wisdom. He was not above his position, and never allowed such a sentiment as generosity to interfere with the plain rules of business. He carried a wand of office, made of silver, which he asserted to be an indication of authority given to him by the government. Valuable goods he carefully stowed away in some of his numerous warehouses; and when there was no market for them in England, through the apathy of the persons robbed, or the dangers to dishonest purchasers, he despatched them on board a ship of his own to Holland, where he employed a trustworthy agent. Like barbarian monarchs, he gave presents when he wished to express a desire for friendship and assistance; and in order that the recipients of these favours might not be compromised, he retained a staff of skilled artizans, who could so change the appearance of a snuff-box, a ring, or a watch, that not even the real owner could recognise it. When satisfied with the good service of any of his subordinates who might be in danger, he gave them posts in his own household, with money and clothing, and found employment for them in clipping and
- 22. counterfeiting coin. He did not even restrict his operations to London, but, in imitation of other great conquerors and pillagers, or perhaps through the independent working of his own intellect, he divided England into districts, and assigned a gang to each; each had to account to him, as the counties of old to the king, for the revenue collected. And as a well-appointed army has its artillery, its cavalry, and its infantry, so among Jonathan Wild’s retainers there was a special corps for robbing in church, another for various festivities in London, and a third with a peculiar aptitude for making the most of a country fair. The body-guards of a sovereign are usually chosen for their appearance, or for tried valour in the field. Wild’s principle of selection was somewhat different. He considered that fidelity to himself was the first virtue in a follower, and that fidelity was certain only when there was absolute inability to be unfaithful. For this reason the greatest recommendation which any recruit could possess was that he had been a convict, had been transported, and had returned before the time of his sentence had expired. Such a man as this not only had experience in his profession, but was legally incapable of giving evidence against his employer. Through his actions he was always in the power of Wild, who, as the law stood, could never be in his power. Thus Wild’s authority was in two ways supreme. Nor was he the first man who ever abused such authority. He did what political parties had done in earlier times. He used without stint or scruple all the means at his disposal, either to ensure his own safety, or to crush any one whom he suspected. It was necessary, according to the public opinion of his time, that a considerable number of thieves and robbers should be hanged; he satisfied at once the popular notions of justice and his own principles by bringing to the gallows all who concealed their booty, or refused to share it with himself. When required, he provided also a few additional victims in the form of persons who had committed no offence whatever. Sometimes he destroyed them because they were unfortunately in possession of evidence against himself, sometimes only because a heavy reward had been offered for the conviction of any one who might have perpetrated a great crime, and because, with the gang at his back, it was quite as easy
- 23. to prove the case against the innocent as against the guilty, and not less convenient.” Wild’s greatness had a sudden fall. He was arrested for coming to the rescue of a highwayman near Bow, and his enemies at once took courage. He was speedily overwhelmed with evidence, and was hanged in 1725. § 3. Vanity. The vanity of criminals is at once an intellectual and an emotional fact. It witnesses at once to their false estimate of life and of themselves, and to their egotistic delight in admiration. They share this character with a large proportion of artist and literary men, though, as Lombroso remarks, they decidedly excel them in this respect. The vanity of the artist and literary man marks the abnormal element, the tendency in them to degeneration. It reveals in them the weak points of a mental organisation, which at other points is highly developed. Vanity may exist in the well-developed ordinary man, but it is unobtrusive; in its extreme forms it marks the abnormal man, the man of unbalanced mental organisation, artist or criminal. George Borrow, who was so keen a student of men, has some remarks on the vanity of criminals in regard to dress:—“There is not a set of people in the world more vain than robbers in general, more fond of cutting a figure whenever they have an opportunity, and of attracting the eyes of their fellow-creatures by the gallantry of their appearance. The famous Sheppard of olden times delighted in sporting a suit of Genoese velvet, and when he appeared in public generally wore a silver-hilted sword at his side; whilst Vaux and Hayward, heroes of a later day, were the best-dressed men on the pavē of London. Many of the Italian bandits go splendidly decorated, and the very gipsy robber has a feeling for the charms of dress; the cap alone of the Haram Pasha, a leader of the cannibal gipsy band which infested Hungary towards the conclusion of the last century, was adorned with gold and jewels to the value of four thousand
- 24. guilders. Observe, ye vain and frivolous, how vanity and crime harmonise. The Spanish robbers are as fond of this species of display as their brethren of other lands, and, whether in prison or out of it, are never so happy as when, decked out in a profusion of white linen, they can loll in the sun, or walk jauntily up and down.” He then describes the principal features of Spanish robber foppery. [62] More significant and even more widely spread is the moral vanity of criminals. “In ordinary society,” said Vidocq, “infamy is dreaded; among a body of prisoners the only shame is not to be infamous; to be an escarpe (assassin) is the highest praise.” This is universally true among every group of murderers or of thieves; the author of a large criminal transaction is regarded by all his fellows as a hero, and he looks down upon the others with contempt; the man who has had the misfortune to be imprisoned for a small or, in the opinion of criminal society, disreputable offence, represents himself as the author of some crime of magnitude. A Russian youth of nineteen killed an entire family. When he heard that all St. Petersburg was talking of him, he said: “Now, my schoolfellows will see how unfair it was of them to say that I should never be heard of.” It is this same weak-minded desire to excite interest and sympathy which leads young men and women of ill- balanced mental organisation to commit suicide in some public and startling fashion. The same feeling, and also, doubtless, the need for expression, leads to the frequency with which criminals keep diaries. The Marquise de Brinvilliers wrote a minute account of her vices and crimes which was brought up in evidence against her; Wainewright appears to have kept a diary of this kind which also fell into other hands; John Wilkes Booth, the shallow-brained young actor who killed President Lincoln, had, with his stagy patriotism, some of the characteristics of the instinctive criminals, showing themselves especially in his morbid vanity. The chief suffering he felt after the deed was to his vanity. He wrote in his diary: “I struck boldly, and not as the papers say; I walked with a firm step through thousands
- 25. of his friends; was stopped, but pushed on. A colonel was at his side. I shouted Sic Semper before I fired. In jumping broke my leg. I passed all the pickets. Rode sixty miles that night, with the bone of my leg tearing the flesh at every jump.” And again he writes: “After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods, and last night chased by gun-boats till I was forced to return, wet, cold, and starving, with every man’s hand against me, I am here in despair. And why? For doing what Brutus was honoured for—what made Tell a hero.” And again: “I am abandoned, with the curse of Cain upon me, when, if the world knew my heart, that one blow would have made me great.” The excessive vanity of the criminal sometimes leads him to commit the imprudence of talking about his plans beforehand, and so courting detection. Before killing three rich men, a murderer was heard to say, “I want to do something great: oh, I shall be talked about!” We hear of Wainewright’s “insatiable and morbid self- esteem.” He enjoyed the respect paid to him in prison, and insisted upon being treated as a gentleman. A prisoner concluded a letter to her accomplice, “Your Lucrezia Borgia.” Sometimes the vanity of the criminal shows itself in the artistic or dramatic representations which he makes of his crime. Perhaps the most curious and audacious attempt is that recorded by Lombroso, who gives a representation of it: three assassins had themselves photographed as they appeared with knives in their hands and looks of resolute villainy, when about to commit the deed. The Abbé Moreau has described the reception of a great criminal by his fellows at the prison of La Grande Roquette. He is immediately surrounded, though the curiosity remains respectful; “he is a king in the midst of his subjects; envious looks are cast at those privileged individuals who have succeeded in placing themselves near him; they listen eagerly for his slightest word; they do not speak their admiration for fear of interrupting him, and he knows that he dominates and fascinates them.”
- 26. § 4. Emotional Instability. The criminal everywhere is incapable of prolonged and sustained exertion; an amount of regular work which would utterly exhaust the most vigorous and rebellious would be easily accomplished by an ordinary workman. He is essentially idle; the whole art of crime lies in the endeavour to avoid the necessity of labour. This constitutional laziness is therefore one of the chief organic bases of crime. Make idleness impossible and you have done much to make the criminal impossible. It is not without reason that French criminals call themselves pègres (from pigritia), the idle. Lemaire, a notorious French criminal of the beginning of the century, was speaking for all his class when he said to his judges: “I have always been lazy; it is a shame, I admit, but I am not adapted for work; to work one needs an effort, and I am incapable of it; I only have energy for evil; if one must work I do not care about life; I would rather be condemned to death.” While he is essentially lazy, and exhibits this even in his general neglect of personal cleanliness (though sometimes dressed outwardly as an ordinary man of the world), the criminal is capable of moments of violent activity. He cannot, indeed, live without them; they are the chief events of his spiritual life. Louis Desprez, an unfortunate littérateur, imprisoned at Saint-Pélagie for a literary offence, “summed up the psychology of criminals,” remarks M. Émile Gautier, “in one picturesque formula: They see the world under the aspect of an immense gaol alternating with an immense brothel. And this is true. For them imprisonment is the normal condition. Liberty is their holiday, an occasional transitory holiday, during which they wallow in the far niente and debauch, like sailors who consume in three days the earnings of eighteen months, but a holiday which will have an end, a foreseen and expected end.” The criminal craves for some powerful stimulus, excitement, uproar, to lift him out of his habitual inertia. That is why the love of alcohol
- 27. is in all countries so strong among criminals. The man who is organised as we have seen the criminal to be must have some powerful stimulant to take him out of himself, to give him a joy which is otherwise beyond his grasp, and alcohol is the stimulant which comes easiest to hand. When, as frequently happens, he is the child of alcoholic parents, the craving for drink soon obtains morbid intensity. Crime and drink are intimately bound together, although we must beware of too unreservedly setting down drink as the cause of crime. Both crime and drink are the morbid manifestations of organic defects which for the most part precede birth. The abuse of alcohol is not, however, universal among criminals, at all events when any intellectual ability is required. “It would not do to drink in our business,” said a sharper to Lombroso. The criminal finds another strong form of excitement in gambling. The love of cards is even more widely spread among criminals than the love of drink. It frequently becomes a passion. Lauvergne tells of a band of criminals who played for two days without intermission. We hear of a French prisoner who gambled away his meagre rations of bread and wine and at last died of starvation; of another who in the excitement of the game forgot his approaching execution. To all forms of sexual excitement, natural and unnatural, criminals of both sexes resort, often from a very early age. The prison, in which the criminal is confined alone, or with persons of the same sex, serves to develop perverted sexual habits to a high degree. Prince Krapotkine, speaking of the moral influence of prisons on prisoners in France, writes:—“The facts which we came across during our prison life surpass all that the most frenzied imagination could invent. One must have been for long years in a prison, secluded from all higher influences and abandoned to one’s own and that of a thousand convicts’ imaginations, to come to the incredible state of mind which is witnessed among some prisoners. And I suppose that I shall say only what will be supported by all intelligent and frank governors of prisons, if I say that the prisons are the nurseries for the most revolting category of breaches of moral law.”[63] There is
- 28. unquestionable evidence that the same practices exist, notwithstanding all discipline, in English prisons. Such practices grow up chiefly as a means of excitement and diversion in vacuous lives. Love, in its highest and strongest forms, seems to be extremely rare. This is true even when love is the cause of the crime. The love, even when strong, remains rather brutal. When a man was asked if he really loved the woman for whose sake he had murdered her husband, he replied: “Oh, if you had seen her naked!” The craving for excitement, for intoxication, for uproar, finds its chief satisfaction in the love of orgy, which is now almost confined, at all events in its extreme forms, to the criminal and his intimate ally, the prostitute. The orgy is the criminal’s most sacred festival; here he attains his highest experiences of forgetful exhilaration. Vidocq, still a criminal at heart, even after he had become a police official, has described the orgy in his Memoirs:—“Imagine a rather large square hall, with walls, once white, now blackened by exhalations of every kind: such is, in all its simplicity, the aspect of a temple of Bacchus and Terpsichore. At first by a very natural optical illusion, one is only struck by the smallness of the place, but when the eye succeeds in piercing the atmosphere, thick with a thousand vapours which are not inodorous, the size becomes manifest by the details which escape from the chaos. This is the moment of creation; everything clears up; the mist dissipates, becomes peopled and animated; there is movement, agitation, not of empty shadows but of substantial forms which cross and interlace in every direction. What beatitude! What a joyous life! Never for epicureans were so many felicities gathered together as here for those who love to wallow in mire. Around, rows of tables, on which, without their ever being cleaned, disgusting libations are renewed a hundred times a day, serve to frame in a space which is reserved for what are called the dancers. At the end of this infectious den rises, supported by four worm- eaten pillars, a kind of platform, its construction hidden by two or three fragments of old tapestry. On this hencoop the musicians are
- 29. perched, two clarinettes, a fiddle, a loud trombone, and a deafening drum.... In this receptacle one finds none but prostitutes and their bullies, sharpers of all kinds, swindlers of the lowest sort, and a good many of those disturbers of the night whose lives are divided into two parts, one consecrated to rowdyism, the other to robbery.” More interesting than this resort to external sources of stimulus, and more significant of emotional instability, are the spontaneous outbursts of excitement common among criminals, curious self- evolved intoxications springing from mysterious and incalculable depths of the organism. Dostoieffsky has studied these outbursts and admirably described them. “A prisoner has lived tranquilly,” he tells us,[64] “for several consecutive years, and his conduct has been exemplary. All at once, to the great astonishment of his guardians, he mutinies and recoils before no crime, even murder or rape. Every one is astonished. This unexpected explosion is the anguished, convulsive manifestation of personality, an instinctive melancholy, a desire to affirm the degraded ego, an emotion which obscures the judgment. It is like a spasm, an access of epilepsy; the man who is buried alive and who suddenly awakes strikes in despair against his coffin-lid; he strives to push it back, to raise it; his reason convinces him of the uselessness of all his efforts, but reason has nothing to do with his convulsions. It must not be forgotten that nearly every manifestation of the personality of the prisoner is considered a crime; also that the question whether the manifestation is important or insignificant is perfectly indifferent to the prisoner. Risk for risk, it is better to go to the extreme, even to murder. It is only the first step that costs; little by little the man is carried away and can no longer be held in.” The prison has much to answer for in the development of these emotional outbreaks, and it is only in prison that there is opportunity of studying them. It would, however, be rash to conclude that they are entirely due to prison conditions. They are in harmony with all that we know of criminal psychology, and it is not alone under prison conditions that they are the causes of crime.
- 30. In Germany these periodic explosions (known as Zuchthaus-Knall) have been described by Delbrück and Krafft-Ebing. In Italy they have been noted by Lombroso, especially in very hot weather and at such times as epileptic attacks are most frequent, and he regards them as fresh proof of a close relationship between the instinctive criminal and the epileptic. In England they appear to be rare in men, but, on the other hand, common in women who have, in prison language, “broken out.” This wild fit of maniacal violence which from time to time seizes on the women confined in prisons, and might almost be regarded as an exaggerated or vicarious form of orgy, has been studied with some care in England. Here as well as abroad it is frequently supposed to be a voluntary insubordination deserving punishment. A lady superintendent thus described the “breaking out” to Mayhew: —“Sometimes they know when the fit is coming on, and will themselves ask to be locked up in the refractory wards. When they’re in these fits they’re terribly violent indeed; they tear up and break everything they can lay their hands on. The younger they are the worse they behave. The most violent age, I think, is from seventeen to two or three and twenty;—indeed they are like fiends at that age very often.” The medical officer told him that “4 per cent. of the whole of the prisoners, or 20 in 600, were subject to such fits of violent passion, and these were almost invariably from fifteen to twenty-five years of age.” “Women,” he added, “seldom injure themselves or those around them, though they will break their windows, and even occasionally tear their own clothing to ribbons.”[65] Miss Mary Carpenter, in her Female Life in Prison, reproduces what she tells us is a characteristic dialogue:— “‘Miss G., I’m going to break out to-night.’ “‘Oh, nonsense; you won’t think of any such folly, I’m sure.’ “‘I’m sure I shall.’
- 31. “‘What for?’ “‘Well, I’ve made up my mind, that’s what for. I shall break out to- night—see if I don’t.’ “‘Has any one offended you or said anything?’ “‘N-no. But I must break out. It’s so dull here. I’m sure to break out.’ “‘And then you’ll go to the “dark” [cell].’ “‘I want to go to the “dark.”’ “And the breaking out often occurs as promised; the glass shatters out of the window frames; strips of sheets and blankets are passed through or left in a heap in the cell; the guards are sent for, and there is a scuffling and fighting and scratching and screaming that Pandemonium might equal, nothing else.” Dr. Nicolson has made an interesting observation as to the periods when these “breakings-out” are most liable to occur. “At dates corresponding with the menstrual period there is a greater likelihood of their occurrence. Besides having verified this in several cases myself, I have the testimony of experienced prison matrons to the same effect.” These maniacal outbursts of hysteria may be compared to the somewhat similar effects observed especially at the menstrual periods among the epileptic, the insane, and the imbecile. Thus Dr. H. Sutherland (West Riding Asylum Reports, vol. ii.), from observations on 500 inmates of the West Riding Asylum, remarks that in epileptic insanity the fits are generally increased in number, and the patients generally become excited at the catamenial period; while the mania exacerbations usually occur at this time. He notes the frequency of excitement, violence, indecent language, tearing up clothes, etc., among insane women generally at this period. In a girl with congenital imbecility, who became violent, cruel, and capricious at puberty, Dr. Langdon Down noted that the monthly period was always marked by insubordination, violent language, rude gestures,
- 32. and untruthfulness. In ordinary healthy young girls the onset of the monthly period is often marked by a fit of unusual boisterousness. The period of the year seems also to have some influence on the emotional instability. Miss Carpenter remarks that “the prisoners are always the most ill-behaved at Christmas time,” perhaps because this period has, even before the days of Christianity, been associated with excesses. Among the men at Elmira, judging from the charts given by Dr. Wey, there is a tendency to insubordination in the autumn, and also in the spring. In Spanish prisons, it appears from Salillas’s Vida Penal en España, quarrels and arrests are much more common in spring and summer than at any other season. Thus, to take one record: March-May, 8; June-Aug., 9; Sept.-Nov., 4; Dec.- Feb., 3. Two suicides both occurred in September. Very interesting is the instinctive and irresistible character of criminal impulses, as shown by evidence which there is no good reason to impeach. Casanova, speaking of his clever schemes of fraud, says: “When I put into execution a spontaneous idea which I had not premeditated, it seemed to me that I was following the laws of destiny, and yielding to a supreme will.” Several pickpockets have said to Lombroso: “You see, in those moments of inspiration (sic) we cannot restrain ourselves, we have to steal.” “I did try very hard, Miss,” the women will sometimes say to the matron, remarks Miss Carpenter, “but it wasn’t to be. I was obliged to steal, or to watch some one there was a chance of stealing from. I did try my best, but it couldn’t be helped, and here I am. It wasn’t my fault exactly, because I did try.” A pickpocket said to Marro: “When I see any one pass with a watch in his pocket, even though I have no need of money, I feel a real need to take it.” Dostoieffsky, giving a minute account of one of the convicts who was most feared, but who was sincerely devoted to him, says: “He sometimes stole from me, but it was always involuntary; he scarcely ever borrowed from me, so that what attracted him was not money or other interested motive.” Once it was a Bible which he sold to obtain drink. “Probably he felt a strong desire for drink that day, and when he felt a strong desire for
- 33. anything it had to be satisfied. I endeavoured to reproach him as he deserved, for I regretted my Bible. He listened to me without irritation, very peacefully; he agreed with me that the Bible is a very useful book, and he sincerely regretted that I no longer possessed it, but he felt no repentance, not even for an instant, for having stolen it; he looked at me with such assurance that I immediately ceased to scold him. He bore my reproaches because he judged that it could not be otherwise, that he deserved to be blamed for such an action, and that I ought to abuse him, in order to relieve myself, as a consolation for the loss; but privately he esteemed it a folly, a folly which a serious man would have been ashamed to speak of. I even think he regarded me as a child, an urchin who does not understand the simplest things in the world.” Precisely the same instinctive and involuntary impulses, unaccompanied by shame, are found among various lower races. Of the natives of British New Guinea, for instance, it has been said, “They are inveterate thieves, but they experience no sense of shame when they are discovered. They frequently say that they can feel an irresistible power which compels them to put out their hand and close it upon some article which they covet, but which does not belong to them.”[66] § 5. Sentiment. It may seem a curious contradiction of what has already been set down concerning the criminal’s moral insensibility, his cruelty, and his incapacity to experience remorse, when it is added that he is frequently open to sentiment. It is, however, true. Whatever refinement or tenderness of feeling criminals attain to reveals itself as what we should call sentiment or sentimentality. Their cynicism allies itself with sentiment in their literary productions. Their unnatural loves are often sentimental, as revealed in the character of the tattoo marks. Two interesting examples of criminal sentiment have recently been recorded by Dr. Lindau. A German criminal (it is
- 34. perhaps as well to note that he was a German), having murdered his sweetheart most cruelly, went back to her house to let out a canary which might suffer from want of food. Another, after having killed a woman, stayed behind to feed her child which was crying. Lacenaire, on the same day that he committed a murder, risked his own life to save that of a cat. Eugene Aram was very indulgent to animals. Wainewright was always very fond of cats; in his last days “his sole companion was a cat for which he evinced an extraordinary affection.” One of the chief characters of Wainewright’s essays is their sentimentality. Himself, when in prison, he described as the possessor of “a soul whose nutriment is love, and its offspring art, music, divine song, and still holier philosophy.” PLATE XI.
- 35. All prisoners make pets of birds, or animals, or flowers, if they get the chance. This is simply the result of solitude, and has no connection whatever with criminal psychology. It is found, if anything, more frequently among non-criminal prisoners. No one has described better than Dostoieffsky, in his Recollections of the Dead- House, the part that animals play in the lives of prisoners. He describes at length the goat, the horse, the dogs, the ducks, the eagle. No one who has once read it may forget the history of the eagle. The eagle would not be tamed; solitary and inconsolable he refused all food; at last his mournful despair aroused the sympathy of the convicts; they resolved to liberate him, bore him to the ramparts on the cold and grey autumn afternoon, and stood long
- 36. and wistfully watching him as he winged his way across the steppes, free. Family affection is by no means rare among criminals. Often indeed, as is well known, it constitutes the motive for the crime. It is very rare to find a prisoner who is not touched by an allusion to his mother. Inspector Byrnes, of New York, says: “Remember that nearly all the great criminals of the country are men who lead double lives. Strange as it may appear, it is the fact that some of the most unscrupulous rascals who ever cracked a safe, or turned out a counterfeit, were at home model husbands and fathers. In a great many cases wives have aided their guilty partners in their villainy, and the children too have taken a hand in it. But in as many all suggestions of the criminal’s calling was left outside the front door. There was George Engles, the forger. His family lived quietly and respectably, mingled with the best of people, and were liked by all they met. George Leonidas Leslie, alias Howard, who was found dead near Yonkers, probably made away with by his pals, was a fine-looking man, with cultured tastes and refined manners. Billy Porter and Johnny Irving were not so spruce, but they would pass for artisans; and Irving is said, in all his villainy, to have well provided for his old mother and his sisters. Johnny the Greek paid for his little girls’ tuition at a convent in Canada, and had them brought up as ladies, without even a suspicion of their father’s business reaching them. I know this same thing to be done by some of the hardest cases we have to contend with.” Inspector Byrnes also mentions a celebrated burglar and forger of America, called by the fraternity “the Prince of Thieves,” on account of his great liberality; “it is a well-known fact that he has always contributed to the support of the wives and families of his associates when they were in trouble.” The criminal appreciates sympathy. Dostoieffsky tells how immediately the convicts responded to a governor who was affable and good-natured, and treated the prisoners as equals: “They did not love him, they adored him.... I do not remember that they ever
- 37. permitted themselves to be disrespectful or familiar. On the contrary. When he met the governor the convict’s face suddenly lighted up; he smiled largely, cap in hand, even to see him approach.” Prince Krapotkine quotes and confirms the observations of Dr. Campbell, an experienced prison surgeon. By mild treatment, says Dr. Campbell, “with as much consideration as if they had been delicate ladies, the greatest order was generally maintained in the hospital.” He was struck with that “estimable trait in the character of prisoners— observable even among the roughest criminals; I mean the great attention they bestow on the sick. The most hardened criminals,” he adds, “are not exempt from this feeling.” Such sentiment as this—limited, imperfect, fantastic, as it may sometimes seem—is the pleasantest spot in criminal psychology. It is also the most hopeful. In the development of this tenderness lies a point of departure for the moralisation of the criminal. What a ruined fund of fine feeling, for instance, was concealed in the young thief, recorded by Lombroso, who committed suicide by hanging, having first set his shoes on the bed between two straw crosses, as though to say, “I am going; pray for me.” “If one thinks of it,” adds Lombroso, “it is a pathetic poem.” § 6. Religion. In all countries religion, or superstition, is closely related with crime. The Sansya dacoits, in the Highlands of Central India, would spill a little liquor on the ground before starting on an expedition, in order to propitiate Devi. “If any one sneezed, or any other very bad omen was observed, the start was postponed. If they heard a jackal, or the bray of the village donkey, their hearts were cheered; but a funeral or a snake turned them back. They were also very superstitious about their oil. The vessel was not allowed to touch the ground until the oil had been poured upon the torch, and then it was dashed on the earth; and from that moment until the job was finished no water touched their lips.”[67]
- 38. Among 200 Italian murderers Ferri did not find one who was irreligious. “A Russian peasant,” remarks Mr. Kennan, “may be a highway robber or a murderer, but he continues nevertheless to cross himself and say his prayers.” Dostoieffsky also notes the religious ardour with which the convicts gave candles and gifts to the church. All those who live by unlawful methods, said Casanova, confide in the help of God. Naples is the most criminal city in Europe for crimes against the person; the number of murderers there is about 16 in 100,000, while in Italy generally it is 8.12; and in Ireland (the least criminal land in Europe) it is about 5. Naples is also the most religious city in Europe. “No other city,” observes Garofalo,[68] “can boast of such frequent processions; no other, perhaps, is so zealous an observer of the practices of the church. But unfortunately —as an illustrious historian [Sismondi], speaking of the Italians of his day, wrote—‘the murderer, still stained with the blood he has just shed, devoutly fasts, even while he is meditating a fresh assassination; the prostitute places the image of the Virgin near her bed, and recites her rosary devoutly before it; the priest, convicted of perjury, is never inadvertently guilty of drinking a glass of water before mass.’ Those words of Sismondi’s,” Garofalo adds, “are as true to-day as when they were written.” Of Marro’s 500 criminals, 46 per cent. were regular frequenters of church, 25 per cent. went irregularly. Among sexual offenders the proportion of frequenters rose to 61 per cent. A man of sixty, known to Marro, imprisoned for rape on a child of eight, was much scandalised at the irreligious talk of some of his companions. “I do not imitate them,” he said; “morning and evening I say my prayers.” Among women, the governor of Saint Lazare remarked to M. Joly, it is especially the criminals by passion who are superstitious, thieves very slightly so; they are practical women. It must not be supposed that there is insincerity or hypocrisy in the religion of criminals. For the man of low culture the divine powers lend themselves easily to the succour of the individual, and it is always as well to propitiate them. German murderers believe they
- 39. can do this crudely, according to Casper, by leaving their excrement at the spot of the crime. A rather higher grade of intelligence will effect the same end by prayer. A wife who was poisoning her husband wrote to her accomplice:—“He is not well ... if God wished it. Oh, if God would have pity on us, how I would bless Him! When he complains [of the effects of the poison] I thank God in my heart.” And he answers, “I will pray to Heaven to aid us.” And she again, “He was ill yesterday. I thought that God was beginning His work. I have wept so much that it is not possible God should not have pity on my tears.” Lombroso found 248 tattooed prisoners out of 2480 bearing religious symbols, while the slang of criminals witnesses to a faith in God, in the immortality of the soul, and in the church. When a woman who had strangled and dismembered a child, in order to spite its relations, heard her sentence of death pronounced, she turned to her advocates and said, “Death is nothing. It is the salvation of the soul that is everything. When that is safe, the rest is of no account.” It is clear how easily religious beliefs and religious observances, especially in Catholic countries, lend themselves to the practices of the ignorant criminal, and it very rarely happens that the criminal condemned to death fails to avail himself of the ministrations of the chaplain (only once in more than thirty years at La Roquette), and frequently to respond to them with gratifying eagerness. In religion his primitive emotional nature, with its instability and love of sentiment, easily finds what it needs. A French chaplain of experience and intelligence told M. Joly that he had “more satisfaction” with his prisoners than with people of the world. The Rev. E. Payson Hammond, who has conducted many missions to prisoners, finds very great aptitude for conversion among them. Of the convicts of the State Prison of Jefferson City, in the United States, for instance, he remarks:—“Many hearts were melted to tears, and I believe that a very large number were converted.” “Convicts at their last hour,” wrote Lauvergne, “nine times out of ten die religiously. Whatever the enormity of their crimes, they all leave
- 40. durable recollections in the heart of the priest who assists them. He sees them long afterwards in his dreams, beautiful and happy.” When the criminal is not superstitiously devout, he is usually stupidly or brutally indifferent. Maxime du Camp, during a visit to the prison of Mazas, at service time on Sunday, had the curiosity to look into thirty-three cellules, to observe the effect of the ceremony: three were reading the mass; one stood up, with covered head, looking at the altar; one was on his knees; one displayed a prayer-book, but was reading a pamphlet; one wept with head buried in his arms; twenty-six sat at their tables, working or reading. It seems extremely rare to find intelligently irreligious men in prison. The sublime criminals whom we meet with in Elizabethan dramas, arguing haughtily concerning Divine things and performing unheard- of atrocities, are not found in our prisons. Free-thinkers are rarely found. A trifle will induce the prisoner to inscribe himself as Protestant, instead of Catholic, or vice versâ, or to change from one side to the other; but out of 28,351 admissions to three large metropolitan prisons, remarks the Rev. J. W. Horsley, only fifty-seven described themselves as atheists, and this number, he adds, must be further reduced as containing some Chinese and Mahommedans. It should be noted that a profession of atheism would deprive the prisoner of no advantage or privilege open to the others. Mr. Horsley once resolved to keep notes of the first twelve consecutive cases of those who on entrance described themselves either positively as atheists or negatively as of no religion. The results were interesting: 1 was a thief, a rather ignorant person, whose chief reason for being an infidel was that his parents had “crammed religion down his throat.” 2 an ex-soldier, a heavy drinker, and when asked why he had described himself as an atheist, “he said he only called himself mad;” he was actually insane. 3 a burglar, who said he meant that he never attended church because he had seen so much hypocrisy among professing Christians; in a few days he gave up the designation of atheist. 4 was a swindler, a great liar, and probably insane. 5 was a lad of nineteen, of very little intellect, who had
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