The positive school of criminology, then, aside from the greater value attributed to daily and systematic measures of social hygiene for the prevention of criminality, comes to radically different conclusions also in the matter of repressive justice.  The classic school has for a cardinal remedy against crime a preference for one kind of punishment, namely imprisonment, and gives fixed and prescribed doses of this remedy.  It is the logical conclusion of retributive justice that it travels by way of an illusory purification from moral guilt to the legal responsibility of the criminal and thence on to a corresponding dose of punishment, which has been previously prescribed and fixed.

We, on the other hand, hold that even the surviving form of repression, which will be inevitable in spite of the application of the rules of social prevention, should be widely different, on account of the different conception which we have of crime and of penal justice.

In the majority of cases composed of minor crimes committed by people belonging to the most numerous and least dangerous class of occasional or passionate criminals, the only form of civil repression will be the compensation of the victim for his loss.  According to us, this should he the only form of penalty imposed in the majority of minor crimes committed by people who are not dangerous.  In the present practice of justice the compensation of the victim for his loss has become a laughing stock, because this victim is systematically forgotten.  The whole attention of the classic school has been concentrated on the juridical entity of the crime.  The victim of the crime has been forgotten, although this victim deserves philanthropic sympathy more than the criminal who has done the harm.  It is true, every, judge adds to the sentence the formula that the criminal is responsible for the injury and the costs to another authority.  But the process of law puts off this compensation to an indefinite time, and if the victim succeeds a few years after the passing of the sentence in getting any action on the matter, the criminal has in the meantime had a thousand legal subterfuges to get away with his spoils.  And thus the law itself becomes the breeding ground of personal revenge, for Filangieri says aptly that an innocent man grasps the dagger of the murderer, when the sword of justice does not defend him.

Let us say at this point that the rigid application of compensation for damages should never be displaced by imprisonment, because this would be equivalent to sanctioning a real class distinction, for the rich can laugh at damages, while the proletarian would have to make good a sentence of 1000 lire by 100 days in prison, and in the meantime the innocent family that tearfully waits for him outside, would be plunged into desperate straits.  Compensation for damages should never take place in any other way than by means of the labor of the prisoner to an extent satisfactory to the family of the injured.  It has been attempted to place this in an eclectic way on our law books, but this proposition remains a dead letter and is not applied in Italy, because a stroke of legislator’s pen is not enough to change the fate of an entire nation.