Criminal Psychology by Hans Gross (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

is much to catch up with, in the results reached elsewhere. We shall, to be sure, profit by the long period of argument and theorizing and experimentation which European thinkers and workers have passed through. But to reap that profit, the results of their experience must be made accessible in the English language.

The effort, in selecting this series of translations, has been to choose those works which best represent the various schools of thought in criminal science, the general results reached, the points of contact or of controversy, and the contrasts of method—having always in view that class of works which have a more than local value and could best be serviceable to criminal science in our country. As the science has various aspects and emphases—the anthropological, psychological, sociological, legal, statistical, economic, pathological—due regard was paid, in the selection, to a representation of all these aspects. And as the several Continental countries have contributed in different ways to these various aspects,—France, Germany, Italy, most abundantly, but the others each its share,—the effort was made also to recognize the different contributions as far as feasible.

The selection made by the Committee, then, represents its judgment of the works that are most useful and most instructive for the purpose of translation. It is its conviction that this Series, when completed, will furnish the American student of criminal science a systematic and sufficient acquaintance with the controlling doctrines and methods that now hold the stage of thought in Continental Europe. Which of the various principles and methods will prove best adapted to help our problems can only be told after our students and workers have tested them in our own experience. But it is certain that we must first acquaint ourselves with these results of a generation of European thought.

In closing, the Committee thinks it desirable to refer the members of the Institute, for purposes of further investigation of the literature, to the “Preliminary Bibliography of Modern Criminal Law and Criminology” (Bulletin No. 1 of the Gary Library of Law of Northwestern University), already issued to members of the Conference. The Committee believes that some of the Anglo-American works listed therein will be found useful.

Committee on Translations. Chairman, Wm. W. Smithers,     Secretary of the Comparative Law Bureau of the American Bar Association, Philadelphia, Pa. Ernst Freund,     Professor of Law in the University of Chicago. Maurice Parmelee,     Professor of Sociology in the State University of Kansas. Roscoe Pound,     Professor of Law in the University of Chicago. Robert B. Scott,     Professor of Political Science in the State University of isconsin. John H. Wigmore,     Professor of Law in Northwestern University, Chicago.

INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH VERSION.

WHAT Professor Gross presents in this volume is nothing less than an applied psychology of the judicial processes,—a critical survey of the procedures incident to the administration of justice with due recognition of their intrinsically psychological character, and yet with the insight conferred by a responsible experience with a working system. There is nothing more significant in the history of institutions than their tendency to get in the way of the very purposes which they were devised to meet. The adoration of measures seems to be an ineradicable human trait. Prophets and reformers ever insist upon the values of ideals and ends—the spiritual meanings of things—while the people as naturally drift to the worship of cults and ceremonies, and thus secure the more superficial while losing the deeper satisfactions of a duty performed. So restraining is the formal rigidity of primitive cultures that the mind of man hardly moves within their enforced orbits. In complex societies the conservatism, which is at once profitably conservative and needlessly obstructing, assumes a more intricate, a more evasive, and a more engaging form. In an age for which machinery has accomplished such heroic service, the dependence upon mechanical devices acquires quite unprecedented dimensions. It is compatible with, if not provocative of, a mental indolence,—an attention to details sufficient to operate the machinery, but a disinclination to think about the principles of the ends of its operation. There is no set of human relations that exhibits more distinctively the issues of these undesirable tendencies than those which the process of law adjusts. We have lost utterly the older sense of a hallowed fealty towards man-made law; we are not suffering from the inflexibility of the Medes and the Persians. We manufacture laws as readily as we do steam-rollers and change their patterns to suit the roads we have to build. But with the profit of our adaptability we are in danger of losing the underlying sense of purpose that inspires and continues to justify measures, and to lose also a certain intimate intercourse with problems of theory and philosophy which is one of the requisites of a professional equipment and one nowhere better appreciated than in countries loyal to Teutonic ideals of culture. The present volume bears the promise of performing a notable service for English readers by rendering accessible an admirable review of the data and principles germane to the practices of justice as related to their intimate conditioning in the psychological traits of men.

The significant fact in regard to the procedures of justice is that they are of men, by men, and for men. Any attempt to eliminate unduly the human element, or to esteem a system apart from its adaptation to the psychology of human traits as they serve the ends of justice, is likely to result in a machine-made justice and a mechanical administration. As a means of furthering the plasticity of the law, of infusing it with a large human vitality—a movement of large scope in which religion and ethics, economics and sociology are worthily cooperating—the psychology of the party of the first part and the party of the second part may well be considered. The psychology of the judge enters into the consideration as influentially as the psychology of the offender. The many-sidedness of the problems thus unified in a common application is worthy of emphasis. There is the problem of evidence: the ability of a witness to observe and recount an incident, and the distortions to which such report is liable through errors of sense, confusion of inference with observation, weakness of judgment, prepossession, emotional interest, excitement, or an abnormal mental condition. It is the author’s view that the judge should understand these relations not merely in their narrower practical bearings, but in their larger and more theoretical aspects which the study of psychology as a comprehensive science sets forth. There is the allied problem of testimony and belief, which concerns the peculiarly judicial qualities. To ease the step from ideas to their expression, to estimate motive and intention, to know and appraise at their proper value the logical weaknesses and personal foibles of all kinds and conditions of offenders and witnesses,—to do this in accord with high standards, requires that men as well as evidence shall be judged. Allied to this problem which appeals to a large range of psychological doctrine, there is yet another which appeals to a yet larger and more intricate range,—that of human character and condition. Crimes are such complex issues as to demand the systematic diagnosis of the criminal. Heredity and environment, associations and standards, initiative and suggestibility, may all be condoning as well as aggravating factors of what becomes a “case.” The peculiar temptations of distinctive periods of life, the perplexing intrusion of subtle abnormalities, particularly when of a sexual type, have brought it about that the psychologist has extended his laboratory procedures to include the study of such deviation; and thus a common set of findings have an equally pertinent though a different interest for the theoretical student of relations and the practitioner. There are, as well, certain special psychological conditions that may color and quite transform the interpretation of a situation or a bit of testimony. To distinguish between hysterical deception and lying, between a superstitious believer in the reality of an experience and the victim of an actual hallucination, to detect whether a condition of emotional excitement or despair is a cause or an effect, is no less a psychological problem than the more popularly discussed question of compelling confession of guilt by the analysis of laboratory reactions. It may well be that judges and lawyers and men of science will continue to differ in their estimate of the aid which may come to the practical pursuits from a knowledge of the relations as the psychologist presents them in a non-technical, but yet systematic analysis. Professor Gross believes thoroughly in its importance; and those who read his book will arrive at a clearer view of the methods and issues that give character to this notable chapter in applied psychology.

The author of the volume is a distinguished representative of the modern scientific study of criminology, or “criminalistic” as he prefers to call it. He was born December 26th, 1847, in Graz (Steiermark), Austria, pursued his university studies at Vienna and Graz, and qualified for the law in 1869. He served as “Untersuchungsrichter” (examining magistrate) and in other capacities, and received his first academic appointment as professor of criminal law at the University of Czernowitz. He was later attached to the German University at Prague, and is now professor in the University of Graz. He is the author of a considerable range of volumes bearing on the administration of criminal law and upon the theoretical foundations of the science of criminology. In 1893 he issued his “Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter, als System der Kriminalistik,” a work that reached its fifth edition in 1908, and has been translated into eight foreign languages. From 1898 on he has been the editor of the “Archiv für Kriminalanthropologie und Kriminalistik,” of which about twenty volumes have appeared. He is a frequent contributor to this journal, which is an admirable representative of an efficient technical aid to the dissemination of interest in an important and difficult field. It is also worthy of mention that at the University of Graz he has established a Museum of Criminology, and that his son, Otto Gross, is well known as a specialist in nervous and mental disorders and as a contributor to the psychological aspects of his specialty. The volume here presented was issued in 1897; the translation is from the second and enlarged edition of 1905. The volume may be accepted as an authoritative exposition of a leader in his “Fach,” and is the more acceptable for purposes of translation, in that the wide interests of the writer and his sympathetic handling of his material impart an unusually readable quality to his pages.

Joseph Jastrow.

Madison, Wisconsin,
December, 1910.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.

THE present work was the first really objective Criminal Psychology which dealt with the mental states of judges, experts, jury, witnesses, etc., as well as with the mental states of criminals. And a study of the former is just as needful as a study of the latter. The need has fortunately since been recognized and several studies of special topics treated in this book—e.g. depositions of witnesses, perception, the pathoformic lie, superstition, probability, sensory illusions, inference, sexual differences, etc.—have become the subjects of a considerable literature, referred to in our second edition.

I agreed with much pleasure to the proposition of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology to have the book translated. I am proud of the opportunity to address Americans and Englishmen in their language. We of the German countries recognize the intellectual achievements of America and are well aware how much Americans can teach us.

I can only hope that the translation will justify itself by its usefulness to the legal profession.

Hans Gross.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE.

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