OFFENDER. – A preliminary question is the biological definition of the offender; in effect, it is a matter of determining whether offenders constitute, or do not constitute, a category of human beings distinct from others by virtue of particular somato-psychic characteristics.
The answers to this question have varied: at the dawn of criminological studies, the offender was regarded as a “degenerate,” that is, a descendant of ancestors who were tainted or intoxicated; or as a subject descended from the insane. Close relationships were also discerned between crime and insanity. Such conceptions found concrete expression in the doctrine of Lombroso, who first considered the offender a “primitive,” that is, the product of atavistic heredity; then a degenerate due to pathological causes; and finally a particular type of epileptic in whom the irresistible impulse to commit a criminal act represented the counterpart of the convulsive crisis of the common epileptic. According to this theory, the offender would be necessitated by abnormal conditions (hereditary, degenerative, pathological); a series of morphological and psychiatric investigations were undertaken in an attempt to identify and define the distinctive and peculiar characteristics of the offender himself.
It was soon realized, however, that other factors, in addition to organic ones, operated in the offender: namely, sociological and environmental factors; indeed, some scholars maintained that these latter were the only elements determining crime.
Without neglecting problems of a psychological nature, preponderant criminogenic efficacy had nonetheless been attributed to the so-called organic factors and to environmental ones. It was through the work of illustrious Italian authors (Sergi, Sighele, Niceforo, Patrizi, Ottolenghi, etc.) that there emerged that broad doctrinal movement which recognized the preeminent importance of psychological investigations, since the motives for illicit conduct are originally of psychic origin. It was thus argued that in the offender there exists a deep-seated ego, seat of the elementary psychic drives of personality, from which criminogenic stimuli would erupt to the surface after overcoming the antagonistic action of counter-motives promoted by the higher ego (Niceforo). These concepts found a much broader development in the doctrine of Freud (v. PSYCHOANALYSIS): crime would always arise from the unconscious sectors of the personality and almost always from psychic experiences of a sexual nature, which, experienced during childhood, were repressed—with the development, through the agency of the environment, of the subject’s moral consciousness—by the ego into the unconscious.
Especially in recent years, the conviction has been gaining ground that the offender must not always be regarded as necessitated by biological causes. Such a conception may be said to have been concretized at present, despite a recent revival of studies seeking to demonstrate an intimate correlation between temperament and organic constitution, which seemed to hint, under apparently different aspects, at a return to the determinism of past criminological schools. This fundamentally psychological approach has consequently restored dignity to the human person, recognizing that only the free exercise of intellect and will—activities present only in man—can be considered, even from a purely scientific standpoint, the determining factor in conduct.
This is not to deny that crime may sometimes be an expression of a pathological state, but only to affirm that in general the offender is such not because he is sick in body or mind. Indeed, a series of in-depth observations—even by the Roman school of legal medicine—on individual offenders permits the hypothesis to be advanced that the population of penal institutions is predominantly composed of “common” subjects, who may rather be placed within that broad graduated series of human individualities constituted by characterological varieties (v. CHARACTER and CHARACTEROLOGY). It is therefore to be held that there do not exist specific biological characteristics that permit the offender to be distinguished from other men, and that “the differentiation by which some men are judged offenders is not biological but juridical” (Gemelli). It follows that the problem of criminality must be regarded as one primarily of an ethical-social order. V. RE-EDUCATION.
As regards the offender from a juridical standpoint, V. CRIME.