provided the criminal is not dangerous and the crime not grave.  It is absurd to sentence a man to five or six days imprisonment for some insignificant misdemeanor.  You lower him in the eyes of the public, subject him to surveillance by the police, and send him to prison from whence he will go out more corrupted than he was on entering it.  It is absurd to impose segregation in prison for small errors.  Compensation for injuries is enough.  For the segregation of the graver criminals, the management must be as scientific as it is now in insane asylums.  It is absurd to place an old pensioned soldier or a hardened bureaucrat at the head of a penal institution.  It is enough to visit one of those compulsory human beehives and to see how a military discipline carries a brutal hypocrisy into it.  The management of such institutions must be scientific, and the care of their inmates must be scientific, since a grave crime is always a manifestation of the pathological condition of the individual.  In America there are already institutions, such as the Elmira Reformatory, where the application of the methods of the positive school of criminology has been solemnly promised.  The director of the institution is a psychologist, a physician.  When a criminal under age is brought in, he is studied from the point of view of physiology and psychology.  The treatment serves to regenerate the plants who, being young, may still be straightened up.  Scientific therapeutics can do little for relapsed criminals.  The present repression of crime robs the prisoner of his personality and reduces him to a number, either in mass imprisonment which corrupts him completely, or in solitary confinement, which will turn him into a stupid or raving beast.

These methods are also gradually introduced in the insane asylums.  I must tell you a little story to illustrate this.  When I was a professor in Pisa, eight years ago, I took my students to the penitentiaries and the asylum for the criminal insane in Montelupo, as I always used to do.  Dr. Algieri, the director of this asylum, showed us among others a very interesting case.  This was a man of about 45, whose history was shortly the following:  He was a bricklayer living in one of the cities of Toscana.  He had been a normal and honest man, a very good father, until one unlucky day came, in which a brick falling from a factory broke a part of his skull.  He fell down unconscious, was picked up, carried to the hospital, and cured of his external injury, but lost both his physical and moral health.  He became an epileptic.

And the lesion to which the loss of the normal function of his nervous system was due transformed him from the docile and even-tempered man that he had been into a quarrelsome and irritable individual, so that he was less regular in his work, less moral and honest in his family life, and was finally sentenced for a grave assault in a saloon brawl.  He was condemned as a common criminal to I don’t know how many years of imprisonment.  But in prison, the exceptional conditions of seclusion brought on a deterioration of his physical and moral health, his epileptic fits became more frequent, his character grew worse.  The director of the prison sent him to the asylum for the insane criminals at Montelupo, which shelters criminals suspected of insanity and insane criminals.