The Individualization of Punishment - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911. Excerpt: ... thus brought back to the classification of criminals and the measures of individualization. We thus reach an individualization of punishment, which, once and for all, replaces the entire punitive procedure prescribed by the law according to the outer character of the crime,--an individualization adjusted not to the crime but to the organic, latent, or manifest criminality of the individual. This point alone persists; the conception of responsibility disappears, and individualization takes its place; and we reach the order of ideas and the sphere of action of the Italian school. Their definition of individualization becomes merely the utilization of repressive measures to attain the essential end, which is the elimination of criminality either by the moral reform of the criminal, or, if not amenable to reform, by his segregation; and in either case the adaptation of the punishment to the psychological character of the criminal.1 § 46. What Italian Penology has accomplished We should be very grateful to the Italian school for having called attention to this new aspect of the individualization of punishment, and for having thus substituted the individualization based upon the character of the agent for the neo-classic conception of individualization based upon responsibility. Doubtless it should not be forgotten that Wahlberg in 1869, at the same time that he introduced the word "individualization," had already established, with a mass of detail that still retains its importance, the essential relation between the psychological character of the individual and the determination of the punishment.2 But nevertheless it should be recognized that to give the new principle its full scope, and 1 See an important chapter of Vargha's "Die Abschaffung der Strafkn...