Criminal Sociology ( Illustrated )

For moral and social facts, unlike physical and biological facts, experiment is very difficult, and frequently even impossible; observation in this domain brings the greatest aid to scientific research. And statistics are amongst the most efficacious instruments of such observation.It is natural, therefore, that criminal sociology, after studying the individual aspect of the natural genesis of crime, should have recourse to criminal statistics for the study of the social aspect. Statistical information in the words of Krohne, "is the first condition of success in opposing the armies of crime, for it discharges the same function as the Intelligence department in war."From statistics, in fact, the modern idea of the close relation between offences and the conditions of social life, in some of its aspects, and above all in certain particular forms, has most directly sprung.The science of criminal statistics is to criminal sociology what histology is to biology, for it exhibits, in the conditions of the individual elements of the collective organism, the factors of crime as a social phenomenon. And that not only for scientific inductions, but also for practical and legislative purposes; for, as Lord Brougham said at the London Statistical Congress in 1860, "criminal statistics are for the legislator what the chart and the compass are for the navigator."The experimental school, accepting the fundamental and incontestible idea, apart from its numerical and optimistic exaggerations, that the statistics of crime must be considered in regard to the growth and activity of the population, has opened up an entirely new channel of fruitful observations, in the classification and study of the natural factors of crime.