DELINQUENT. - A problem of a preliminary character is the biological definition of the delinquent; in effect, the question is to establish whether or not delinquents constitute a category of men different from others by peculiar somato-psychic characteristics.
The answers to this question have been various: at the dawn of criminological studies, the delinquent was held to be a "degenerate," that is, a descendant of tainted or intoxicated progenitors; or else a subject descended from insane ancestors. Intimate connections between crime and madness were also glimpsed. Such conceptions took concrete form in the doctrine of Lombroso, who considered the delinquent first a "primitive," that is, the product of atavistic heredity, then a degenerate from pathological causes, and finally a particular type of epileptic in whom the irresistible impulse to commit the criminal act would represent the counterpart of the convulsive crisis of the ordinary epileptic. On the basis of this theory, the delinquent would be one necessitated by abnormal conditions (hereditary, degenerative, pathological); with a series of investigations of a morphological and psychiatric order, an attempt was made to identify and define the distinctive and peculiar characteristics of the delinquent himself.
It was realized, however, that other factors, in addition to organic ones, operated in the delinquent: sociologico-environmental ones; indeed, certain scholars maintained that the latter should be considered the only elements determining crime.
Yet without neglecting problems of a psychological nature, a preponderant criminogenic efficacy had been attributed to so to speak organic factors and to environmental ones. It was through the work of illustrious Italian authors (Sergi, Sighele, Niceforo, Patrizi, Ottolenghi, etc.) that there gradually took shape that vast doctrinal movement which recognizes a preeminent importance in psychological investigations, inasmuch as the motives of unlawful action are primitively of psychic origin. It was thus maintained that in the delinquent there exists a deep ego, the seat of the elementary psychic demands of the personality, from which the criminogenic stimuli would originate, bursting forth to the surface after having overcome the antagonistic action of the counter-motives promoted by the superior ego (Niceforo). These concepts found a far broader development in the doctrine of Freud (v. PSICANALISI): crime would always take life from the unconscious sectors of the personality and almost always from psychic experiences of a sexual nature, which, lived during childhood, were removed - with maturation, through the agency of the environment, of the subject's moral conscience - by the ego into the unconscious.
Especially in recent years the conviction has been gaining ground that the delinquent must not always be considered one necessitated by biological causes. Such a conception may be said to be currently given concrete form, notwithstanding that a recent revival of studies, tending to demonstrate an intimate correlation between temperament and organic constitution, seemed to shadow forth, under apparently different aspects, a return to the determinism of past criminological schools. This fundamentally psychological orientation has consequently restored dignity to the human person, recognizing that only the free exercise of the intellect and the will - activities present only in man - must be held, even from a purely scientific point of view, to be the determining factor of action.
By this it is not intended to deny that crime may sometimes be the expression of a pathological state, but only to affirm that in general the delinquent is such not because he is sick in body or mind. Indeed, a series of observations conducted in depth - also by the Roman medico-legal school - on individual delinquents allows us to put forward the hypothesis that the population of penal institutions is constituted predominantly of "ordinary" subjects, who are to be placed, if anything, in that vast graduated series of human individualities constituted by characterological varieties (v. CARATTERE and CARATTERIOLOGIA). Accordingly, it is to be held that there exist no specific biological characteristics that allow one to distinguish the delinquent from other men and that "the differentiation by which some men are judged delinquents is not biological but juridical" (Gemelli). It follows that the problem of criminality must be considered a problem predominantly of an ethico-social order. V. RIEDUCAZIONE.
As regards the delinquent under the juridical aspect v. DELITTO.
Bibliography3 works
Giovanni De Vincentiis