Dr. Algieri studied the interesting case and came to the diagnosis that there was splinter of bone in the man’s brain which had not been noticed in the treatment at the hospital, and that this was the cause of the epilepsy and demoralization of the prisoner.  He trepanned a portion of the skull around the old wound and actually found a bone splinter lodged in the man’s brain.  He removed the splinter, and put a platinum plate over the trepanned place to protect the brain.  The man improved, the epileptic fits ceased, his moral condition became as normal as before, and this bricklayer (how about the free will?) was dismissed from the asylum, for he had given proofs of normal behavior for about five or six months, thanks to the wisdom of the doctor who had relieved him of the lesion which had made him epileptic and immoral.  If this asylum for insane criminals had not been in existence, he would have ended in a padded cell, the same as another man whom I and my students saw a few years ago in the Ancona penitentiary.  The director, an old soldier, said to me:  “Professor, I shall show you a type of human beast.  He is a man who passes four fifths of the year in a padded cell.”  After calling six attendants, “because we must be careful,” we went to the cell, and I said to that director:  “Please, leave this man to me.  I have little faith in the existence of human beasts.  Keep the attendants at a distance.”  “No,” replied the director, “my responsibility does not permit me to do that.”

But I insisted.  The cell was opened, and the man came out of it really like a wild beast with bulging eyes and distorted face.  But I met him with a smile and said to him kindly:  “How are you?” This change of treatment immediately changed the attitude of the man.  He first had a nervous fit and then broke into tears and told me his story with the eloquence of suffering.  He said that he had some days in which he was not master of himself, but he recognized that he was good whenever the attacks of temper were over.  Without saying so, he thus invoked the wisdom of human psychology for better treatment.  There is indeed a physician in those prisons, but he treats generally only the ordinary diseases and is not familiar with special psychological knowledge.  There may be exceptions, and in that case it is a lucky coincidence.  But the prison doctor has also his practice outside and hurries through his prison work.  “They simulate sickness in order to get out of prison,” he says.  And this will be so all the more that the physicians of our time have not sufficient training in psychology to enable them to do justice to the psychology of the criminal.

You must, therefore, give a scientific management to these institutions, and you will then render humane even the treatment of those grave and dangerous criminals, whose condition cannot be met by a simple compensation of the injury they have done to others.

This is the function of repression as we look upon it, an inevitable result of the positive data regarding the natural origin of crime.