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

I felt, I heard, I saw this or that, in 99 cases put of 100 they mean only that they have been aware of some kind of sensation the nature of which they determine in a judgment. Most erroneous inferences ensue in this fashion. They are rarely formal and rarely arise by virtue of a failure to use logical principles; their ground is the inner paucity of a premise, which itself is erroneous because of an erroneous perception or conception.[161] As Mill rightly points out, a large portion of mankind make mistakes because of tacit assumptions that the order of nature and the order of knowledge are identical and that things must exist as they are thought, so that when two things can not be thought together they are supposed not to exist together, and the inconceivable is supposed to be identical with the non-existent. But what they do not succeed in conceiving must not be confused with the absolutely inconceivable. The difficulty or impossibility of conceiving may be subjective and conditional, and may prevent us from understanding the relation of a series of events only because some otherwise proximate condition is unknown or overlooked. Very often in criminal cases when I can make no progress in some otherwise simple matter, I recall the well known story of an old peasant woman who saw the tail of a horse through an open stable door and the head of another through another door several yards away, and because the colors of both head and tail were similar, was moved to cry out: “Dear Lord, what a long horse!” The old lady started with the presupposition that the rump and the head of the two horses belonged to one, and could make no use of the obvious solution of the problem of the inconceivably long horse by breaking it in two.

Such mistakes may be classified under five heads.[162]

(1) Aprioristic mistakes. (Natural prejudices).

(2) Mistakes in observation.

(3) Mistakes in generalization. (When the facts are right and the inferences wrong).

(4) Mistakes of confusion. (Ambiguity of terms or mistakes by association).

(5) Logical fallacies.

All five fallacies play important rôles in the lawyer’s work.

We have very frequently to fight natural prejudices. We take certain classes of people to be better and others to be worse than the average, and without clearly expressing it we expect that the first class will not easily do evil nor the other good. We have prejudices about some one or another view of life; some definition of justice, or point of view, although we have sufficient opportunity to be convinced of their incorrectness. We have a similar prejudice in trusting our human knowledge, judgment of impressions, facts, etc., far too much, so far indeed, that certain relations and accidents occurring to any person we like or dislike will determine his advantage or disadvantage at our hands.

Of importance under this heading, too, are those inferences which are made in spite of the knowledge that the case is different; the power of sense is more vigorous than that of reflection. As Hartmann expresses it: “The prejudices arising from sensation, are not conscious judgments of the understanding but instinctively practical postulates, and are, therefore, very difficult to destroy, or even set aside by means of conscious consideration. You may tell yourself a thousand times that the moon at the horizon is as big as at the zenith—nevertheless you see it smaller at the zenith.” Such fixed impressions we meet in every criminal trial, and if once we have considered how the criminal had committed a crime we no longer get free of the impression, even when we have discovered quite certainly that he had no share in the deed. The second type of fallacy—mistakes in observation—will be discussed later under sense perception and similar matters.

Under mistakes of generalization the most important processes are those of arrangement, where the environment or accompanying circumstances exercise so determinative an influence that the inference is often made from them alone and without examination of the object in question. The Tanagra in the house of an art-connoisseur I take to be genuine without further examination; the golden watch in the pocket of a tramp to be stolen; a giant meteor, the skeleton of an iguana, a twisted-looking Nerva in the Royal Museum of Berlin, I take to be indubitably original, and indubitably imitations in the college museum of a small town. The same is true of events: I hear a child screeching in the house of the surly wife of the shoemaker so I do not doubt that she is spanking it; in the mountains I infer from certain whistles the presence of chamois, and a single long drawn tone that might be due to anything I declare to have come from an organ, if a church is near by.

All such processes are founded upon experience, synthesis, and, if you like, prejudices. They will often lead to proper conclusions, but in many cases they will have the opposite effect. It is a frequently recurring fact that in such cases careful examination is most of all necessary, because people are so much inclined to depend upon “the first, always indubitably true impression.” The understanding has generalized simply and hastily, without seeking for justification.

The only way of avoiding great damage is to extract the fact in itself from its environment and accompanying circumstance, and to study it without them. The environment is only a means of proof, but no proof, and only when the object or event has been validated in itself may we adduce one means of proof after another and modify our point of view accordingly. Not to do so, means always to land upon false inferences, and what is worse, to find it impossible upon the recognition of an error later on, to discover at what point it has occurred. By that time it has been buried too deep in the heap of our inferential system to be discoverable.

The error of confusion Mill reduces especially to the unclear representation of what proof is, i.e., to the ambiguity of words. We rarely meet such cases, but when we do, they occur after we have compounded concepts and have united rather carelessly some symbol with an object or an event which ought not to have been united, simply because we were mistaken about its importance. A warning example may be found in the inference which is made from the sentence given a criminal because of “identical motive.” The Petitio, the Ignorantia, etc., belong to this class. The purely logical mistakes or mistakes of syllogism do not enter into these considerations.

Section 33. (k) Statistics of the Moral Situation.

Upon the first glance it might be asserted that statistics and psychology have nothing to do with each other. If, however, it is observed that the extraordinary and inexplicable results presented by statistics of morals and general statistics influence our thought and reflection unconditionally, its importance for criminal psychology can not be denied. Responsibility, abundance of criminals, their distribution according to time, place, personality, and circumstances, the regularity of their appearance, all these have so profound an influence upon us both essentially and circumstantially that even our judgments and resolutions, no less than the conduct and thought of other people whom we judge, are certainly altered by them.[163] Moreover, probability and statistics are in such close and inseparable connection that we may not make use of or interpret the one without the other. Eminent psychological contributions by Münsterberg show the importance the statistical problems have for psychology. This writer warns us against the over-valuation of the results of the statistics of morality, and believes that its proper tendencies will be discovered only much later. In any event the real value of statistical synthesis and deduction can be discovered only when it is closely studied. This is particularly true with regard to criminal conditions. The works of many authors[164] teach us things that would not otherwise be learned, and they would not be dealt with here if only a systematic study of the works themselves could be of use. We speak here only of their importance for our own discipline. Nobody doubts that there are mysteries in the figures and figuring of statistics. We admit honestly that we know no more to-day than when Paul de Decker discussed Quetelet’s labors in statistics of morality in the Brussels Academy of Science, and confessed what a puzzle it was that human conduct, even in its smallest manifestations, obeyed in their totality constant and immutable laws. Concerning this curious fact Adolf Wagner says: “If a traveler had told us something about some people where a statute determines exactly how many persons per year shall marry, die, commit suicide, and crimes within certain classes,—and if he had announced furthermore that these laws were altogether obeyed, what should we have said? And as a matter of fact the laws are obeyed all the world over.”[165]

Of course the statistics of morality deal with quantities not qualities, but in the course of statistical examination the latter are met with. So, e.g., examinations into the relation of crime to school-attendance and education, into the classes that show most suicides, etc., connect human qualities with statistical data. The time is certainly not far off when we shall seek for the proper view of the probability of a certain assumption with regard to some rare crime, doubtful suicide, extraordinary psychic phenomena, etc., with the help of a statistical table. This possibility is made clearer when the inconceivable constancy of some figures is considered. Suppose we study the number of suicides since 1819 in Austria, in periods of eight years. We find the following figures, 3000, 5000, 6000, 7000, 9000, 12000, 15000—i.e., a regular increase which is comparable to law.[166] Or suppose we consider the number of women, who, in the course of ten continuous years in France, shot themselves; we find 6, 6, 7, 7, 6, 6, 7; there is merely an alternation between 6 and 7. Should not we look up if in some one year eight or nine appeared? Should not we give some consideration to the possibility that the suicide is only a pretended one? Or suppose we consider the number of men who have drowned themselves within the same time: 280, 285, 292, 276, 257, 269, 258, 276, 278, 287,—Wagner says rightly of such figures “that they contain the arithmetical relation of the mechanism belonging to a moral order which ought to call out even greater astonishment than the mechanism of stellar systems.”

Still more remarkable are the figures when they are so brought together that they may be seen as a curve. It is in this way that Drobisch brings together a table which distributes crime according to age. Out of a thousand crimes committed by persons between the ages of:

  AGAINST
PROPERTY AGAINST
PERSONS Less than     16 years 2 0.53 16-21 105 28 21-25 114 50 25-30 101 48 30-35 93 41 35-40 78 31 40-45 63 25 45-50 48 19 50-55 34 15 55-60 24 12 60-65 19 11 65-70 14 8 70-80 8 5 More than 80 2 2

Through both columns a definite curve may be drawn which grows steadily and drops steadily. Greater mathematical certainty is almost unthinkable. Of similar great importance is the parallelization of the most important conditions. When, e.g., suicides in France, from 1826 to 1870 are taken in series of five years we find the figures 1739, 2263, 2574, 2951, 3446, 3639, 4002, 4661, 5147; if now during that period the population has increased from 30 to only 36 millions other determining factors have to be sought.[167]

Again, most authorities as quoted by Gutberlet,[168] indicate that most